


Tengu Dances

by RiverValeria



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Assassination Plot(s), Conspiracy, Family Drama, Family Secrets, Fatherhood, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Major Illness, Mystery, Politics, Post-Canon, Post-Fourth Shinobi War, Romance, Sunagakure | Hidden Sand Village, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2019-10-20 17:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17626166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverValeria/pseuds/RiverValeria
Summary: In the years since the Fourth War, Kankurō 's life has changed very little. A few new scars, some new jutsus, a number of unmemorable women in his bed. But life has a funny way of catching up with you all at once. While struggling to conceal a mysterious illness from his siblings, Kankurō encounters a precocious, orphaned genin puppeteer with some alarmingly familiar habits...





	1. A Little Bird

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously this is not my world, just my playground.
> 
> No major warnings so far, beyond language. There will be allusions to sexual abuse - nothing especially graphic. I haven't written any violent bits yet, so I don't know how intense they'll be, but likely there will be nothing worse than you'd see in the anime. Canon pairings for any characters already paired off by the time of Boruto - Naruto Next Generations. You're getting into a family drama featuring Kankurō, with a side dish of the usual shinobi shenanigans, so if you jumped in expecting Sandcest, sorry to disappoint. I hope you enjoy it, and please don't hate me for slow updates - I have a kindergartner and a full-time job!

Kankurō was not having a good day.

Mind, most days were not _good_ days anymore. The desk job that had chafed so unbearably that first year now proved to be a blessing in disguise, affording him both privacy and a certain degree of freedom where his hours were concerned. His office in the theatre, where the most recent crop of puppeteer recruits trained, had been decorated by a softer, more academic sort of man. Kankurō had been too lazy to update it to suit his own tastes, and that had been a blessing, too. At the moment, he was curled up in a ball on the other’s man’s sofa. A blinding headache beat painfully against the navy upholstery with its thin gray stripes, and his stomach churned and roiled, though there was nothing in it.

Groping for a coherent thought through the pain, he tried to remember which cocktail of drugs he was supposed to take now. There had been so many medications, and so many varying dosages of each, that he had almost given up on finding a pharmaceutical solution to his current dilemma. But the medics insisted. He still may have ignored them, except for the simple fact that he would eventually have to justify that decision to Gaara. And they did help, sometimes, if he took them early enough. When it got this bad, no drug sufficed to stifle the pain.

No, today was definitely not a good day.

His stomach heaved, and he pressed his lips together, trying to decide whether he was really going to be sick. He no longer wondered whether one could vomit on an empty stomach. One most certainly could. It was a horrid, noxious green mess of bile and undiluted stomach acid, rather than masticated meat and plant fibers, but it came up just the same way and tasted worse. That thought decided it: he rolled off the couch, dizzy with the headache, and staggered into the bathroom, holding his pounding head in his hands.

When he had finished, he lay spent on the cold tile floor. Spots danced before his eyes, but he didn’t have the strength to get up and turn off the bathroom light. Going back to the sofa was out of the question. There had been resistance and escape training which had been preferable to this, he thought dimly, and a vague recollection of shivering for hours, chained down in a tank of icy water, bubbled through to the surface of his mind. After a moment, that memory was all that remained, and he slipped out of consciousness into a thankfully painless sleep.

When he woke, dawn was breaking, and the whole theatre campus was silent. The migraine had passed, though it left him with a crushing sense of fatigue. That didn’t matter. Exhaustion was a never-ending plague, and he managed anyway. In research and development, it didn’t matter whether he labored dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn, as long as the job got done. And he usually didn’t mind the work. The only reason he’d hated this job to begin with had been the certainty that Gaara had stuffed him into it in hopes of keeping him safe, and because he knew it would eventually remove him from the duty roster for active assignments.

He was an excellent shinobi, but a brilliant inventor. Already his role as a craftsman, as a weapons master for Suna, was guaranteed. The most promising recruits would be apprenticed to him, and such a role was far more important to the village than that of one rank and file jounin puppeteer. It was an honor to have risen so quickly. It was a joy that his Gaara had believed him capable of filling such a position, long before Kankurō himself had realized just how completely his skills exceeded those of his peers. It was an honor and a joy, and he loved making puppets. But for all of that, it was damned boring.

He missed the excitement, the blood, and the thrill of wreaking havoc with his creations. He was a true son of the puppeteer corps; the art was indivisible from the fight. But he was also a loyal brother, even if Temari still thought he was a pain in the ass, and he couldn’t deny Gaara anything. If Gaara wanted him at home, home he would stay.

Of course, he’d barely seen Gaara in the last few months. Rendered useless for hours at a time, he spent most of his waking, functional hours at the theatre, trying to keep up with his largely self-imposed workload. He met his brother for brief lunches, long enough to keep abreast of the little fires the Kazekage was constantly called upon to extinguish: small bands of rogue shinobi, political aggravations of varying importance, and recently, a string of mysterious murders that left the victims utterly drained of their chakra. They were supposed to have dinner together in a couple of days, as a matter of fact. And – damn the luck – Temari was would be in town, too, visiting from Konoha. Seeing him so infrequently, she couldn’t fail to notice the changes in the elder of her two brothers.

Kankurō grimaced to himself, gathering his bearings as he peeled himself off his bathroom floor. As a little kid, he’d been a tad pudgy, and Temari liked to remind him of it. She couldn’t tease him now, he thought ruefully, dragging his shirt up before the bathroom mirror. His ribs protruded above a hollow belly, and he’d had to order new trousers. He studied his empty stomach for a moment, debating whether or not he ought to try to eat something. The migraines that had beleaguered him for the last six months invariably nauseated him, long before they began and often for hours after they ended. He vomited so frequently that he’d ended up in the hospital three times, badly dehydrated. More alarmingly – at least from his standpoint, because it was getting harder to conceal – he had lost eight kilograms since those first blinding headaches had forced him to seek assistance. His physician had forbidden him to train (an injunction he ignored), and was threatening to admit him to the hospital.

Frustrated, and anxious that Gaara shouldn’t find out, he had bullied the good doctor into inserting a permanent port in his chest.  Once able to administer the necessary rehydration fluids himself, Kankurō had avoided the hospital as much as possible, returning only once to have his no-longer effective meds tweaked. That had proven more trouble than it was worth; his physician had been extremely concerned with the amount of weight he had lost, and sent him home with bags and bags of partial parenteral nutrition solution, to supplement what he was able to eat. He was _supposed_ to use a bag every other day, given how little he could stomach during an attack. They kept him chained to his desk for hours at a time, though, and the migraines descended several times a week. A pile of them lay unused in his desk drawer, along with plastic tubing, a sharps disposal box, and a box of sterile needles.

He surrendered this time, however, and clicked a needle into place, hanging the attached bag of fluids on the back of his desk chair. He would eat breakfast when it drained, despite a complete lack of appetite. His sister was sure to comment on his weight loss, despite his loosely fitted costume and hood, but that might be laughed off. Dehydration and inanition would etch fatigue too sharply into his face, highlighting his hollow cheeks and painting the circles under his eyes garishly black against his pale skin. He had to present himself in the best possible light while she was here.

But for now, it was time to get to work, and the wheels in his head began to grind against gears and cogs, pulleys and poisons.

Some of his colleagues had seen limited success in harnessing the energy of black powder; and while Kankurō preferred to rely on mechanical principals, avoiding the volatile chemical mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur, the damn stuff was fascinating, and he found himself constantly toying with the idea. It had a lot of potential, if you could only get around its vulnerability: any shinobi with a refined control of fire-nature chakra could deduce the presence of the explosive and proceed to deflagrate the powder at will. He wasn’t exactly a purist, but loading one’s primary weapon with an explosive which, improperly ignited, could destroy the weapon itself seemed counter intuitive.

He was thumbing through a friend’s treatise when a faint tapping at his door roused him from his reveries. A quick, practiced jerk had the IV line free of the port, and he dropped the needle into an unmarked box in his bottom desk drawer before answering the hesitant knock.

His visitor surprised him. He hadn’t really been expecting anyone, but there were usual suspects – messengers from Gaara, colleagues in the theatre. Temari was known to drop in unannounced when she was visiting, because she was a nosy bitch who still didn’t believe he could boil water without spoiling the pan or burning himself, but she wasn’t due to arrive until late tomorrow. So today his guest was a puppeteer, all of 130 cm tall, with a mane of wild black curls crammed under a woefully undersized hood.

She was a pale, skinny thing garbed in traditional black, with huge, moss-colored eyes. They were wide and round and winged at the outer tips, and she looked just like a scrawny black kitten watching from beneath the pointed ears of her hood, which was laughably rounded over her mass of hair. A hitai-ite belted around her narrow waist announced her genin rank, almost as certainly as the awe with which she regarded him.

Hero-worship was okay, in small doses. After about a minute, though, Kankurō wagged his brows at her. “I’m busy, kid, so get to it.”

“Oh! Sorry.” She bit her lip, embarrassed. “I… um…” She shivered a little, and Kankurō pinched the bridge of his nose as she fumbled for something to say.

“Kid…”

“My sensei made me come!” She gave him a swift, deferential bow. “I didn’t want to, but he said you should see it.”

“See… what?” Kankurō prompted, losing patience quickly.

 “My puppet.”

“And your sensei is who, again?”

“Ajibana Ibuki.”

Kankurō scowled. Ibuki was a fine shinobi – he wouldn’t waste Kankurō’s time. If he’d sent this snip of a girl with something to show, it was something worth seeing. Kankurō moved further into his office to grant her entry.

 “Well, haul it out and let’s have a look, then.”

She peered around him, pursing her lips thoughtfully. “There’s not enough room…”

Kankurō glanced around the generous space of his office, and then examined her. No visible puppets, and no carrying scrolls. “How big is this thing?”

She shook her head violently, causing the hood, which had only been attached to her head with a prayer, to sail over his desk and onto his chair. She yelped and moved to chase it.

The IV bag was still hanging on the back of his desk chair. With a grunt, Kankurō launched himself over her head, tucking and rolling in midair to land behind the desk. He swiped the hood from the chair and vaulted back over the desk with it before she could even gasp.

“Here.” He held it out to her. She stared at it for a moment, as if debating whether to put it back on. But she took it and shoved it back over her head before making a graceful little bow of gratitude.

 “You were telling me why there wasn’t enough room in here,” he reminded her. “Stay focused.” His voice was a little sharper than her nervousness should have inspired, but his antics had tired him. That worried and infuriated him.

She bit her lip anxiously and pointed upward. “The ceiling. It’s too low.”

“Okay,” he answered, impatient. “Will the east side stage do?” It was the closest of the performance stages and usually abandoned this time of day.

She nodded, another vigorous motion that threatened to detach her hood.

Kankurō gestured brusquely at the door, and she hurried through it and down the corridor. He sauntered behind her, trying to ignore the twinges of pain from the catheter in his chest.

“What’s your name, kid?” he asked as they walked.

She glanced back at him, and the hood slipped off her hair. She caught it in midair and flushed. “Nozara Kumi.”

“Leave it off,” Kankurō advised, as she glared at the offending article with unconcealed distaste. “That hair of yours is as good as a hood, anyway.”

Her nose wrinkled crossly. “That’s what I said! The day I joined the theatre. But Ajibana-sensei said, ‘It’s tradition!” and made me wear it. I put fire paste in his shoes,” she went on, with a sudden unexpected gleam in her eye, “and he blamed Arii Hachiuma, my teammate – who had laughed at me because of the hood.”

Kankurō grinned despite himself. Evidently, she wasn’t naturally as reserved as she had appeared to be. “How did you convince him that Arii was the one responsible?”

She shrugged, and fell back a few paces to walk beside him. “I paid a chuunin to do it for me. Ajibana –sensei had yelled at him one day for sleeping during gate duty. He did it during the night. Hachiuma is the only one who lives at home with his parents – our other teammate and I have a curfew at the barracks, so it couldn’t have been us. Besides,” she smirked, “Everybody knows Arii’s an ass.”

Curfews were strictly enforced in the barracks for anyone under the age of seventeen, so she had a solid alibi. Kankurō blinked at the profanity, but was more interested in her living arrangements. Genin didn’t live in the barracks unless they had no parents looking out for them. Orphaned, then.

“It could have been someone else, though,” Kankurō observed, filing away the girl’s probable history as a potentially worthwhile piece of trivia.

Kumi shook her head. “Possibly, but if you’re good enough to be a jounin instructor, there aren’t many people in the village who would be bold enough to pull pranks on you, outside your team. And even if there were, Ajibana-sensei is pretty well-liked. _I_ like him, when he isn’t telling me to put the hood back on. Hachiuma was the most logical suspect.”

Kankurō nodded along thoughtfully, his grin broadening in growing admiration of the childishly vindictive plot. “I like the way you think,” he approved.

Glowing under his praise, she bit her lip again – a nervous habit, Kankurō decided – and was silent all the way to the stage.

The east stage was the only indoor stage on the theatre grounds. Suna traditionally held its performances outdoors, but the occasional rare storm had necessitated an indoor performance hall. Of course, in typical shinobi fashion, it was never meant to be solely recreational. The platform was made of pockmarked limestone, which had been marked and chipped over the years by hundreds of stray kunai and other projectiles, and all the partitions could be easily removed or rearranged for practice in an enclosed space.

He spent a great many hours on this stage, these days. It was thankfully winter, and rarely topped 20 degrees outside, but Suna’s aridity was barely tolerable at the best of times. With dehydration an ever-present threat for the ailing puppet master, he kept himself indoors as often as possible, where the humidity was ever-so-slightly higher than the windswept desert plains that surrounded the village. His days revolved around the migraines and damned IV bags, finding things to do for the hours he was confined to his desk or bed, scheduling presentations and meetings when he was free of them, and training only immediately after an infusion of hydrating fluids.

He wasn’t aware of the scowl that had blackened his features until Kumi asked, “Kankurō-dono? Is something wrong?”

He blinked rapidly at her, clearing his mind, and shook his head. “Nothing that concerns you. I was thinking about something else.” He gestured at the stage. “Listen, I’m not a patient guy. Let’s see what got Ibuki so riled up.”

She bobbed a nod at him and scrambled to the opposite side of the stage, losing her puppeteer’s hood along the way. Kankurō followed the tiny puppeteer’s bobbing black curls up the stairs. He sat on the edge of the top step, giving Kumi as much room to perform as he was able, though there was still no puppet in sight. The little girl turned back to face him, bit her lip again, and swallowed hard. Then she started to run, a hard sprint that would eat the distance between them in seconds.

A deft motion of her fingers tugged a small fawn-colored object, no bigger than her hand, from her robe. Another quick motion launched the object into the air. Her chakra strings caught the light as she spun on her heel and darted back the way she had come, with the puppet in tow, perhaps ten feet off the ground. Wheeling to face Kankurō once again, she flung her arms out and spread her fingers.

The desert lark remained aloft, gliding silently toward the stairs, where he sat watching with a vague sense of disappointment. It was a beautifully crafted bird, complete with sand-colored feathers and glass eyes, so lifelike that it would fool anyone who didn’t know better. The glide was perfect, too, better than anything he had ever seen attempted. Her techniques were top notch for a genin. He glanced up at her, trying to decide if it was worth trying to be nice, and seeing his disenchantment, Kumi grinned.

Drawing her hands back toward herself, she stalled the glide. And let go.

Even as her chakra strings dissipated, a pair of tiny wings with rosy brown pinions spread out before him, two needle-like sets of talons appeared from the soft down of the belly, and the puppet began to beat the air below it with a near-silent rustle of feathers.

Kumi grinned at his shock, and wiggled her string-free fingers at him. The bird soared upward, then dove toward the stage, toward the hood Kankurō had believed she had dropped unintentionally. One snap of the puppet’s talons snagged it from the ground. Higher and higher it flew, until it almost disappeared in the dark rafters above. It hung there for a long while, sailing on another perfect glide, this time totally uncontrolled, until finally the bird banked left and began to descend on slow wingbeats. Kumi raised a hand, and the little songbird fluttered down to perch on her finger. Instantaneously strings flew from her opposite hand to find purchase on the tiny puppet. It began to fidget excitedly, bobbing up and down on the girl’s hand, dipping its head low and twisting round to scan its surroundings.

Kumi giggled at the stupor on Kankurō’s face, green eyes dancing mischievously beneath her curls.

Kankurō stood up so quickly he felt dizzy. Trying to pick a single question out of the dozens swirling in his brain was like trying to follow the harmony of a single instrument in an orchestra, but he settled for two in rapid succession.

“Who built that puppet – and who taught you to fly it?”

 “I did,” Kumi answered, still panting.

“Bullshit.”

“I did!” Kumi’s finger tugged slightly at a string, and the puppet ruffled its feathers and snapped its beak at him. The movement was so realistic that Kankurō grinned in spite of himself.

“Not trying to take anything away from you, kid. That was an amazing performance. I might even be willing to believe you could mostly teach yourself to manipulate it. Maybe. But you didn’t build that puppet.”

Her eyes narrowed. “The hell I didn’t!”

That made him grin, too. Such blatant disrespect would never be tolerated from a colleague, but her passion was too infectious, and the curse tickled him. In turn, his humor infuriated her, and that amused him all the further.

“My mother,” she said, laying a definite stress on the noun, “was a puppeteer. She designed it. Mostly.” A flash of old hurt welled up in her eyes, and even though it was quickly smothered by indignation and anger, it stripped the joy from the moment. Kankurō felt his smile fade. He fixed a serious gaze on the green eyes, unapologetic, but conceding the pain the admission caused her. He waited patiently for her to continue.

She reached up to stroke the bird. Eyes on the floor, lips pressed together, she steeled herself before returning his gaze. “In the Fourth War, she met a shinobi who used chakra-infused ink to draw animals that fought for him. She thought she could manage something similar with chakra-infused strings and wires.

“She never got it quite right,” Kumi said, watching Kankurō’s face carefully. “The longest flight she managed was just over thirty seconds. That was three weeks before she died.”

Kankurō didn’t say a word.

“She would have figured it out, eventually,” Kumi said. A muscle jumped in her jaw. “It was mostly the wing shape.”  A twist of her finger laid the wings open for his inspection; the lark arched its feathers over its head like a crown.

“Her mother raised messenger falcons, so that’s what she based her models on. But falcons have wings built for speed and power; it takes too much energy, too much effort, too many wing beats to keep them flying. Passerines have short, rounded wings,” she gestured quickly around the tips of the sandy feathers, “that have a wider area to diffuse the weight over. They’re not nearly as fast in the air, but they can take off quickly, and they’re extremely maneuverable. And the lower energy expenditure means the chakra in the wires persists for a lot longer.”

The puppet lowered its wings, and she stared at it. She laid a hand on it, as if to pet it again, and let it rest on the bird’s back. “It’s not a weapon,” she admitted. “It was never meant to be a weapon. But it’s big enough for a microphone, or even a camera, and a transmitter. A perfectly inconspicuous little spy.”

Kankurō’s mind raced. It wasn’t the first time a puppeteer had attempted automating a puppet, but the incredible amounts of energy needed to fuel the damned things made them almost prohibitively chakra intensive. Sai’s ink, or Deidara’s clay, both of which functioned on the same principle as Kumi’s chakra-infused strings, weighed relatively nothing compared to the very solid ninjutsu puppets of the corps. The chakra necessary to manipulate such weight drained from the special strings so swiftly as to make them useless.

“How did she – how do you – compensate for the chakra decay?”

“A chakra-draining seal, written in my blood,” Kumi explained, tapping the bird’s neck. “It’s triggered when the chakra reaches a certain minimum threshold – or I can end the automation by resuming manual control.”

He blinked. “That’s… ingenious.”

Kumi stroked the little songbird again. “That was Mom’s idea,” she said. “Using chakra-draining seals against herself to transfer chakra without having to touch her target. She used it in combat to trigger complex traps, stunning her enemies before finishing them off with puppetry. Applying it to her puppets was a natural next step.”

“What is she called?” He assumed Kumi assigned a feminine pronoun to her puppet; most young female puppeteers did.

“Just Little Bird.”

His smile returned, a little. “As in, ‘A little bird told me I’d get to see something spectacular today,’ yeah?”

That won him a grudging smile, and he got to his feet. Making his way toward her, he pointed at the puppet. “May I?”

Kumi nodded, and handed him the lark.

“What did you use? It’s lighter than I expected.”

“The strings are spider-silk; the rest is mostly balsa and polyurethane. Birds have hollow bones, you know.”

“I think I remember that from biology,” Kankurō replied absently, turning the lark over in his hands, admiring the craftsmanship. “The eyes came from Eiji, I can see that. Where did you get the feathers?”

“I made them. They’re too important to chance on hand-me-downs from dead animals.”

“These are artificial?” Kankurō demanded, lightly running his hand over the down on the bird’s minute breast.

Kumi’s nose wrinkled, but she nodded again. “They’re a _lot_ of work. I’m working on a bat prototype, right now, mostly because of those, but not having much luck. Same issue as the raptors – too many wingbeats.” She tugged, and the bird stepped forward on Kankurō’s hand, displaying its wings. “A real desert lark would preen itself to maintain the integrity of its feathers. Obviously Little Bird can’t do that. She’s pretty, but her feathers are too time-consuming, and too often and easily damaged.”

“Come with me,” he said, thrusting the puppet toward her, though sorely disappointed to relinquish the remarkable creation. “We’ve got work to do.”


	2. Beads on a String

He kept Kumi long into the night, grilling her over the finer points of the bird’s construction and the techniques she used to fly it, though he hadn’t asked her to take it apart for him. Clearly the feathers were a problem, and he didn’t want to handle it any more than necessary until some solution presented itself. There was a detailed skeleton under the soft dun plumage, however, as well as some tremendously complex wiring, and his fingers itched to replicate and innovate on the little girl’s masterpiece. He demanded her designs – as well as drafts of any other puppets she had conceived, including her currently non-functional bat – and very nearly had an apoplectic seizure when she confessed she didn’t have a clean copy of the bird’s schematics.

“I didn’t really make it for anyone but me,” she protested. “I didn’t think anyone else would _need_ those designs.”

He almost chewed off his tongue, fighting the urge to berate her. “Well,” he said, choking down invective, “I need them. As soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how amazing it is, if we can’t replicate your results. How soon can you get them to me?”

“Um… day after tomorrow?”

“Don’t set a deadline you aren’t sure you can meet, kid,” he warned her. “Don’t they teach you anything in Academy?”

She rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, Kankurō-dono. Friday morning – I can have them to you by Friday morning.” The unconscious eye rub made him glance at the clock, and he cursed loudly enough that she jumped.

“Ah, dammit! I didn’t realize it had gotten so late. I’ll walk you back to the barracks; you’re out way past curfew.”

“Thank you very much,” she said with a polite bow, “but it’s okay. I’m always in trouble for getting back late.” She yawned behind her fingers. “Honestly, they’ll be suspicious if I have a valid defense.”

He insisted on making her excuses, however, and led her out of the theatre into the quiet, windswept streets of a sleeping Sunagakure. Walking alongside her, he noted again how remarkably small she seemed compared to the other genin in the village.

“Kumi, how old are you?”

“I’ll be eleven next we –” she began, but clapped her hand over an enormous yawn before she could finish.

“Did you start Academy early, or finish early?” he asked, intrigued. Most students graduated to genin in the spring, at eleven or twelve. It lacked two weeks to the new year, so she had advanced at an early ten.

“Finished,” she replied. She gave him a smug, sideways glance. “Top of my class,” she added.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he replied, “the way you handled that puppet.” He shook his head. “Few genin puppeteers would be able to manage both hands so well, never mind combining ninjutsus like you have.”

“That first isn’t entirely skill,” she admitted, and laid her palms open before her. “I was born ambidextrous.”

He grinned down at her in surprise. “It helps, doesn’t it?” and turned up his own, equally versatile hands.

“You too?” She smiled back impishly. “My classmates were always pissed at me, because I mastered hand seals so fast.”

“My hand seals were fine, but I never had much patience for genjutsu.” He gestured to the left; either engrossed in the conversation or simply tired, Kumi had lost track of where she was going, failing to make the turn toward the barracks. “Never saw any reason to rely on it,” he continued, as they turned the corner. “I’d have to release my chakra strings to perform any. If I have to choose one or the other, I’m keeping my puppets.”

Kumi was nodding along as he spoke. “If I’ve been beaten badly enough that I can’t manage my puppet anymore, no genjutsu is going to save me,” she agreed.

“What _do_ you use for combat?” he asked, realizing belatedly that he hadn’t thought to ask about her chief weapon.

“Naruki is her name. I’ll bring her when I give you my drafts.”

“Not one of the training puppets,” he surmised.

“Those clunky things?” She grimaced. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with one.”

Kankurō laughed out loud. “I begged and begged Lady Chiyo to mentor me,” he recalled, “and although she refused, she finally gave me some puppets that had been designed by Sasori of the Red Sand. I think she knew I’d end up so fascinated that I’d spend my hours mastering them instead of harassing her.”

“I’d like to see them,” Kumi said, covering up another yawn. Then she blinked. “Oh, sorry!” She bowed so quickly that her hood flew off. She stooped and snapped it up with practiced ease. “That was presumptuous of me.”

“I’m half-confiscating your designs,” he reminded her. “I don’t mind. I’ll show you Karasu if you’ll show me Naruki.”

“Really?” Suddenly wide-eyed, she stared up at him, reprising the hero-worship that had snarled her tongue when she first came in his door.

“If you don’t irritate me too badly,” he amended, and she smiled sheepishly.

“Karasu is a _legend_.” She nearly squealed her excitement.

“I’m pretty attached to him.” Kankurō shrugged.

“Naruki will be a legend too, someday,” she promised, eyes glowing. “You’ll like her. Just watch. When I’m done, no one will even _remember_ Sasori of the Red Sand.”

He raised his brows. “And what about me, Mistress Puppeteer?” he asked, with a mocking little bow.

She grinned in reply, her adoration usurped by good humor. “Can’t say for sure, yet. Let me know when you’re finished making history,” she answered cheerfully. Then she wrinkled her little nose with distaste. “But Sasori-san’s scene is over. _I_ won’t even need to desecrate any corpses to upstage him,” she added, with a supercilious huff. The effect was only slightly marred by the barely repressed yawn that followed it.

Her juvenile glee and resolve were infectious, and as they chatted, he was struck with the idea of taking her on as an apprentice. It was something he’d been meaning to do – and kind of dreading, honestly. He wasn’t fond of children as a rule.

Kumi was extremely young – genin were rarely granted such an honor, even those that had graduated a year early and first in their classes. But Kankurō had encountered any number of talented young shinobi, and not one of them impressed him as the cat-eyed, curly-headed genin had done. For most nin, puppeteering was a job, like any other jutsu, and while every puppeteer treasured his unique weapons, they remained tools, and the art itself was a skill to be mastered, a means to an end. For Kumi, both were a joy.

Her passion so mirrored Kankurō’s own that he was unexpectedly sorry to have to leave the little girl at the barracks gate, with a contrite bow and a brief word of explanation to the admin on duty.

He took himself home then, amusing himself by imagining the sort of combat puppet Kumi might have created for herself. If it was anthropoid, it would likely be female, but he wasn’t at all convinced that she would have restricted herself to the basic forms that most beginners used. Her control was very fine, and ambidexterity was a tremendous boon in their profession, whether a natural gift, as Kumi’s and Kankurō’s, or acquired by practice. Veteran puppeteers often favored puppets with extra limbs that could be weaponized, such as the insects, scorpions, and spiders that were perennially popular. And while Kumi seemed generally good-natured, she had a definite streak of conceit where her jutsus and her puppets were concerned. She would utilize as complex a weapon as she could manage, for the sake of proving that she could.

But pretty. Maybe _not_ insectoid, then. Its casing would be exquisite, and probably as realistic as any inanimate object could be made to look. Her artist’s touch and fussy attention to detail were only too apparent in Little Bird’s perfection. His own sense of artistry ran toward the inner workings of his creations, so he had never much bothered with the shells, preferring the application of grease and poison to paint and varnish.

Thinking about the probable particulars of Kumi’s puppets roused a too-often suppressed desire to tinker with his own. After he got home, he spent several pleasant hours fiddling with a model he had begun months ago and never found time to finish. It wasn’t until the sun began peering through the window that he laid his work aside, weary now that he wasn’t distracted, and leaned back in his chair to consider his progress.

The cobra was almost purely for pleasure, allowing him to experiment with a sort of sinewy movement achieved with a series of pulleys. The technique was devilishly difficult, but the resulting movement was remarkably fluid, and more importantly, unpredictable. The many joints gave him multiple angles of attack, and the puppet’s slim length could wrap twice around an average-sized man. The strings that bound it together were entirely inert – not the special chakra-responsive strings that most puppeteers relied on. With the specialty thread, pure intent was enough to maneuver the puppet – you needed only to understand of how the chakra must flow to manipulate the weapon. It was this thread that made the manipulation of a puppet with one finger possible. But strings broke; Kankurō could operate any of his weapons solely with chakra threads, if he had to, or even assemble and manipulate a completely unstrung puppet.  Until he knew this one as intimately as he knew his primary weapons, he would use only plain cord and his own will to power it.

Finding himself nodding off at his work table, he finally dragged himself off to bed, trying to remember how many nights had passed since he had last slept in it. His waking hours hung together like beads on a string, but the order that had once governed their placement had been lost. He slept erratically, often for only an hour or two at a time, when he was too tired or in too much pain to function. Occasionally a migraine put him out of commission for longer – three days ago he had slept from dawn until well after dark, flat on his back on his office floor.  

Grimacing at the memory, he attempted a stretch, rolling his shoulders back and forth. It hurt more than it should, and he gave up, rolling his head from side-to-side instead. Even that small movement tugged spitefully at the knots in his upper back. At thirty-three, he felt like an old man.

“Fuck,” he murmured to himself, with a disconsolate scowl at the pale reflection in his bedroom mirror. His eyes were bloodshot with fatigue, and dark half-moons marred the tender skin beneath them. He hid it well enough, when he had to – astringent drops helped some with the redness, and a new kabuki paint design served both to conceal the bruises and draw attention away from his newly prominent cheekbones.  

He stared at the sunlit window, urging himself to find the energy to draw the curtain, promising himself a decent sleep in a real bed, in a dark room, with no possibility of some stray puppeteer disturbing his slumber with his or her engineering woes. Finally, with a flick of his fingers, he summoned just enough of a chakra string to tug at the drapes. His cheek touched the pillow, and he slept.

A jarring brrrringgg! roused him several hours later. Leveling a baleful stare at the cellular phone Gaara had insisted he carry, Kankurō debated pitching the damned thing into the garbage before resigning himself to wakefulness. 

“Hello?” His voice was cracked and gravelly with sleep, but he played it up a little more than necessary, indulging a rare fit of passive aggressiveness.

“Kankurō.” There was a pause, and then Gaara said, with a note of regret, “You were sleeping.”

“Well, yeah,” Kankurō said more clearly, cursing his ill-humored playacting. He should have looked at the damned screen; he would never have made Gaara feel badly about calling him, no matter what the hour. “But I’m awake now, so… What’s up?”

“There’s been a development. I’m sending a currier with classified documents now. I want your thoughts before I bring it up with the Council.” The brief, measured statements were classic Gaara – almost. He spoke a little too quickly, though, and Kankurō, who knew him better than anyone, rose instantly to his feet.

“Got it. I’ll track you down as soon as I’ve got a handle on it.” 

“Thank you, Aniki. I’m sorry to have wakened you.”

“Forget it. I’ll see you later.”

 

 

The documents turned out to be a briefing on recent murders in the Land of Water, and a letter with a broken wax seal. Kankurō frowned at the latter, and thumbed through the briefing. The victims were bandits and rogue shinobi – criminals all, and no one anybody would really miss, but the disturbing manner of their deaths had the shinobi world abuzz with speculation. All had been utterly drained of their chakra. As near as anyone could tell, there had been no struggle, no confrontation of any kind. They simply were, and then they were not. Kankurō had heard the scuttlebutt, like everyone else. He hadn’t realized Gaara had been compelled to take a hand in the mystery.

Setting aside the report, he picked up the letter. The gazelle that had been pictured in the stamp was hopelessly mutilated, but the indigo wax was immediately recognizable; the young daimyo of Kaze liked Gaara immensely, and wrote him often. Terashima was a quick-witted, gregarious man of about thirty-five, well-liked throughout his kingdom and respected abroad.  Though best known for his statesmanship, the daimyo indulged many passions, from horseback riding to beer-brewing. Unlike the sluggish old curmudgeon that had been his father, Terashima was a high-energy, forward-thinking, hands-on leader.

Gaara considered the man a friend. Kankurō found him thoroughly exhausting, too fond of the sound of his own voice and overly impressed with his own wit, an impression borne out by his letter, as his writing proved as jocularly verbose as his speech. Kankurō was weary halfway through the first page.

_From His Most Benevolent Majesty, Lord of Kaze no Kuni,_

_To His Excellency, the Lord Kazekage of Sunagakure,_

_Our most affectionate greetings._

_It is our sincere wish that this communication finds you well, your family in good health, and your people flourishing. It is also our sincere wish that it finds you seated, for we have ill tidings to impart and a tremendous impertinence to petition of you._

_My friend,_

_In your letter dated 6 November, you asked my assistance in researching civilian encounters with chakra-draining jutsus, like to those recently plaguing our neighbors. I rather imagined – as I suspect you did – that the request was perfunctory; certainly, I expected no returns on my inquiries. I was shocked and much distressed therefore, when the grim narrative which I impart below was delivered into my hands. I fear you shall have need of this information in the days to come. If you are pleased to grant the shameless favor I shall put to you, however, I believe you shall be convinced, as I always have been, that generosity often supplies its own rewards._

_I am sure you remember from your history lessons (better than I, perhaps, you strike me as a more attentive student) that the time of the First Shinobi World War was marked by heavy civilian casualties and rife with conspiracy. My own ancestor was reported to have expected every day to meet an assassin in his bedchamber. Into the midst of this suspicion and chaos there entered a man who proposed to limit the excesses of shinobi violence._

_He first approached the Daimyo of the Land of Fire, causing a great stir in the daimyo’s court, with his pale skin, strange eyes, and frightening protuberances on his brow. I can see the faint surprise on your face, dear friend – I confess my jaw dropped to the floor, to hear one of the Otsutsuki so clearly described. He made an offer to the Fire Daimyo, and vanished, to repeat his offer to the heads of the other great nations. The mysterious creature proposed to use his own genetics to craft weapons of such overwhelming strength that they might be used against even the most dangerous ninja with impunity. What was required, he said, was the raw material with which to fashion such great weapons: human beings. More specifically, and horrifically, children._

_Fearing every day to lose their lives to shinobi assassins, their political legitimacy to a starving and increasingly riotous populace, and their revenues to the ever-mounting damages of war, the daimyos of the five great nations met in secret, and reluctantly but unanimously agreed to the creature’s bid. Fifty children from each nation would be supplied to him, orphans who would not be missed and who would otherwise meet their ends at the hands of starvation or exposure. This pitiful defense, I am ashamed to say, is quoted from the confidential archives in my palace; I suppose in the wake of what happened afterward, the daimyos felt the need to justify themselves. For one year after disappearing with his “raw materials,” the Otsutsuki (forgive me, I would give you a name, if I had one) presented his triumphs, one by one, to each daimyo. There were five of them; the other two hundred and forty-five children would never be seen again._

_The eldest of the survivors was all of thirteen years of age. The youngest was three._

_I’m afraid from there the story is redacted (and by ‘redacted,’ I mean whole swaths of script were cut out of the scrolls in the palace archives), and the narrative does not resume for almost a year. What may be surmised from the text that follows is that each of the children were trained as their daimyo saw fit; the eldest among them, the girl presented to Water and the boy serving Fire, were at this point actively engaged in the trade for which they had been fashioned: assassination. What is of importance to you, my friend, is that some of these assassinations were carried out in precisely the manner which you described to me. The victims were all utterly drained of their chakra._

_A description of how this was accomplished was not left to us – if, indeed, anyone was able to understand it at the time. Over the course of the next twenty years, all the Otsutsuki weapons would be blooded – so frequently, and to such effect, that the records here strongly suggest that this “anti-shinobi” effort played a tremendous and totally clandestine role in bringing weary ends to both World Wars. This is probably difficult to believe, from your perspective, and certainly I wasn’t there, but the Daimyos of the day believed so strongly in the efficaciousness of the Dread Five that the Wind Daimyo’s personal guard placed them all under a Stone Sleep jutsu, to be awakened when shinobi violence once again threatened to overshadow the world. (It’s quite fascinating; I’ll have the original scrolls copied out and sent to you – but I know I mustn’t wait to get this brief abstract in your hands.)_

_When I discovered this, I immediately sent messengers to the other Daimyos. My friend – all the sleepers are missing from their resting places, excepting one. I fear one of these may prove to be your chakra-draining murderer. If so, I beg you will be most cautious. The archivists who recorded what little I impart seemed to believe these people could kill with barely a thought – and unlike myself, the Royal Archive is not at all disposed to exaggeration._

_The last verifiable record of their having been safely asleep in the custody of their daimyos is nearly fifteen years old – three of the current Daimyos (including myself) had not even been informed of their existence, their predecessors being unwilling to test the fragile peace brokered by Konoha and Suna so many years ago.  The other Daimyos may – or may not, our forebears were a nauseatingly suspicious lot – have more information on their... well, the Fire Daimyo called them ‘assets, and I lack a better term. I can tell you only of the single child that remained in Kaze's custody, the youngest of the Dread Five, and the only one still sealed._

_Seven years old at the close of the First War, and twenty-three at the beginning of the Second, she would enter her Stone Sleep with a total of forty-eight assassinations to her name – assassinations which left their targets utterly drained of their chakra. (I hasten to add that we have irrefutable proof that Fujimori Amai has been in the crypt in which she was sealed for the past eighty years – she cannot be responsible.) Her marks were rogue nin, primarily, but as the covert divisions of the major villages of the time were appalling corrupt, the occasional Anbu or Root member made her list. I decline to provide this to you; I doubt there is anyone alive to resent Fujimori’s unique contributions to the war, but I am well aware that nin have long memories_.

_My great-grandfather suffered terrible guilt from his part in Fujimori’s creation, and perhaps to assuage it, he brought her here, to his Capital, and educated her alongside his own children. She was formally adopted by the Captain of the Royal Sentinels, trained by rogue nin, professional spies, and veteran soldiers. At seventeen, she joined the Sentinels as one of the Daimyo’s most trusted and most capable guards. She would thwart three assassination attempts against him before the start of the Second War._

_My great-grandfather called her a heroine; my grandmother remembers her quite fondly._ _With her former comrades missing, and a murderer who shares her peculiar skills on the loose, it seems I cannot leave her to slumber longer._ _So it is I find myself presented with the task of bringing one whose service proved so invaluable to my family, my kingdom, and the world at large, into a world that cannot but fear and despise her._

_I tell you nothing you will not have surmised for yourself when I say that the secrecy in which the Dread Five operated was as much for their protection as the daimyos’. Had someone like Danzo or Orochimaru been aware of their unique abilities – I shudder to think. You can well imagine the reaction of the shinobi world upon Amai’s re-emergence – you have seen already the panic strewn by our shadowy murderer. I would be remiss in my obligation to a woman who faithfully served my family, were I to send her into that world defenseless. Yet, with little protection to offer, I must brazenly request your assistance._

_Having had the honor and pleasure of your friendship, I am convinced that the bond between the civil and military governments of Kaze no Kuni will never again be so strained as it was in our great-grandfathers’ day. I cannot believe that our own Suna could be used against the citizens of our beloved nation, and therefore I have no desire to maintain a secret weapon such as Fujimori. However, all that I have heard and read implies Fujimori Amai to be a woman of duty, and she will require a duty to perform._

_I desire it may be Suna’s._

_It is not guards and safe-houses Fujimori requires, for these I could purchase, but rather the support, the validation, the endorsement of a powerful shinobi village, and that I may only request. Therefore, I do. Orochimaru and his ilk would not hesitate to cross me – but most would balk at thumbing their noses at the whole of the Hidden Sand Village. Will you, dear Kazekage, consider extending the protection of Suna to this rather remarkable young lady? She has a great deal to offer in return, should you choose to accept her. And, of course, you must accept my own lavish gratitude – but we can talk figures at another time._

_I do not ask for your reply. I will ask, with the utmost respect, that you join me in Shiroiya for Fujimori Amai’s awakening from her Stone Sleep, and that you will work together with her to locate the person responsible for the terrible deaths plaguing Hi no Kuni. Name the day that is convenient for you._

_Fondest regards,_

_Terashima_

 

Bloody hell. He wasn’t asking much, was he?

Kankurō snorted and laid aside the painfully long-winded letter. His first reaction was a resounding negative, but he knew how deeply Gaara must empathize with the Otsutsuki’s experiments. Neglected children, abandoned to the torments of foes impossible to resist, for reasons beyond their understanding – oh, yes. Gaara could be easily compelled to offer the woman refuge, if she wanted it. And that was why he had sent Terashima’s letter immediately onward to his more objective elder brother. He probably wanted validation, but he would accept advice – and that was part of what made him such a great leader.

Kankurō roused himself and went to shower. Water being the commodity it was in Kaze's arid climate, showerheads came with timers, and although the five minutes allotted was more than enough time to wash, this morning he would have gladly shattered the damned thing for another ten minutes. The hot water soothed his sore muscles and stirred his sleep-deprived mind, and he stood in the steam for a long while after the water cut off, streaming sweat and water and mulling over the Daimyo’s letter.

Taking the woman in –offering her citizenship, as Terashima plainly wanted, though he hadn’t said it in so many words – carried some significant risks to Suna, even if she was a model candidate for asylum. Kankurō rather doubted it, the fond memories of the Daimyo’s grandmother notwithstanding. A civilian heroine she may have been, and a Sentinel besides, but she had been engineered and taught from her infancy to murder shinobi. The most honorable of soldiers would find it difficult to accept the charity of former enemies. He couldn’t, not if his life depended on it. Hers might.

If Fujimori could do as Terashima said, and drain her victims’ chakra instantly, she had a big target painted on her back. The Daimyo had understated the risks there – it wasn’t just whack jobs that would be tempted to make a play for her. Hidden Villages had been known to abduct individuals with rare kekkei genkai, sometimes to kill and dissect, but often to steal the bloodline by means of rape. If Gaara authorized Terashima’s request, they would be courting such an attack on their own Village, endangering their own people for a stranger’s sake. Further, and perhaps more damningly, Suna would be forced to view an attack on her by another Village as an act of war, and respond in kind.

But Suna at war meant that Kaze no Kuni would also be at war. So, the Daimyo was prepared to commit Kaze's full military strength and civilian resources to protect Fujimori – that was interesting, Kankurō mused. The hot steam had dissipated, so he reluctantly toweled off and went back to the letter, rereading bits of it and trying to reconcile how Terashima could be so dedicated to protecting a woman he had never met, and yet so eager to rid himself of her. He might not face quite the dangers his great-grandfather had, but she had been a Royal Sentinel once. Why not simply have her resume her duties among the Daimyo’s personal guard?

He dressed slowly, troubled. Terashima’s reasons for shipping Fujimori off to Suna seemed thinner as he glanced through the end of the letter. He’d never known a statesman to place such a premium on honoring a past debt – most of them tried to forget they owed anything to anyone. Terashima was a decent man, or so Kankurō believed, but he was still a politician, forever angling for the best deal. He must know more than he was telling; he wanted to retain an asset to Kaze, but also to keep her at arms’ length. So much so that he was laying his plans before he even unsealed her. Why?

Impossible to speculate. Kankurō snorted and set the question aside.

At face value, it was a tremendous boon to grant, and conceding it would place Terashima directly over a barrel should they desire his assistance at a later date. A favor to redeem with the Daimyo of the Kaze no Kuni was not insignificant restitution. Also, allowing that Fujimori might in fact be an honorable woman and amenable to the arrangement, the woman herself could prove an invaluable ally. Suna had its share of rare and valuable jutsus, but her ability would be one a hell of a jewel in the Village’s crown. Particularly if it might be passed down. She was still biologically in her early twenties; it wasn’t unthinkable she could make a family in the Village.

It was worth meeting her, he decided. He applied his paint – a comedic design today, he was wearied of seriousness – and went to find his brother.


	3. Big Fish

A few years after Gaara had been pronounced Kazekage, he abandoned the office in the imposing tower that had housed his father and the Kazekages before him, removing his day-to-day activities to a small, unused room on the ground floor. One morning, during a lull in his duties, he packed up his few personal items and carried them downstairs. The empty office was already furnished with a spare desk and an old bookcase, so the move was easily accomplished. He turned the desk to face the pair of wide, floor length windows which imbued the room with its irresistible attraction, set a picture of Shinki on one side of the battered desk and a picture of himself with his siblings on the other, and that was that. He hadn’t informed anyone of his intentions, though not because he had expected an outcry. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the change would alarm anyone.

After the fact, he realized his taciturnity had led him into a misstep; his subordinates were stunned and none too pleased. All tried to change his mind, citing security concerns and urging him to remember that his position carried a certain dignity, which could not be supported by a tiny office on the street, where anyone passing by might see him at work. They failed to carry their points, though, in an attempt at compromise, he did agree to have the room appointed in a mode more becoming his station. Privately he failed to understand the necessity. Why anyone should be offended by serviceable furniture, tiled floors as opposed to carpeted ones, or a dearth of drapery continued to mystify him.

He still held meetings in the tower, when the attendees numbered too many for his new quarters, and he still received important visitors standing behind the ancient granite desk that dominated the room, but he wouldn’t have traded his current view for anything. The street outside the Kazekage’s enormous windows was one of the busiest in the village. Directly opposite his desk, a street vendor plied sweet cakes, attracting the children of the village whenever they had a spare coin or two burning a hole in their pockets. He’d first seen Shinki outside those windows, solemn-faced and reserved among rowdier companions, handing off his coins for a strawberry pastry. Life happened out there, on that street, in the shrine a block to the east, in the sushi parlor he could see in the edge of the glass, in the grocery store and the bookshop and the jewelers’. And he could see it happening, and in seeing, know that he was a small part of the people eating and drinking and shopping, chasing their children and laughing at their friends and holding hands with their lovers.

He couldn’t have explained how viscerally this knowledge grounded him, so he never tried. And most everyone gave up nagging him after a few months, except for his sister, who expressed her distaste for his chosen accommodations years after the fact. His brother, on the other hand, had taken the change in stride. He oversaw a few discreet precautions to better secure the building, such as replacing the window panes with ballistic glass coated in a one-way mirror film, ensuring Gaara could see but remain unobserved, and he increased the security detail on the first floor. Otherwise, the Kazekage’s elder brother never questioned the decision, or even inquired as to its motivation.

Unable to fathom why Kankurō’s reaction had been so different from Temari’s, or anyone else’s for that matter, Gaara had asked him about it.

Kankurō shrugged. “I guess it’s because you never ask for anything.”

Gaara pointed out that as Kazekage, he gave orders constantly, but Kankurō shook his head.

“You don’t ask for anything for yourself, Gaara,” he said, and before Gaara could express his confusion, he’d anticipated the question. “You’ve never been materialistic, but that’s not what I mean.

“Take Temari. If you were going to eat dinner out with her, where would you go?”

“Quaff’s.”

“And me?”

Gaara had smiled. “Whatever street vendor we happened to be passing at the time.”

“Naruto-san?”

“Ramen, of course.”

 “What’s Shinki’s favorite color?”

“Blue.”

“And my favorite play?”

“ _Knights of Misfortune_.”

Gaara dutifully answered each question his brother asked, until at last Kankurō gave him a crooked half-smile.

“D’you have any idea how difficult it would be for most people to answer any of those questions about you?”

Gaara frowned. “You could.”

“Of course I could. I pay attention. But my friends all know I like little hole-in-the-wall joints for food. The entire village of Konoha – hell, most of the world – could tell you the Hokage loves ramen. People know, because we’ve told them. Maybe we said something directly, maybe just a passing comment, or maybe we pulled a face when someone mentioned a thing we didn’t like – but one way or another, we’ve expressed our tastes and preferences to the people around us.”

He gestured at the room around them. “You don’t do that. You don’t _tell_ people that you’d rather have gizzards than seafood, or that you find geta uncomfortable, or that you don’t like music that doesn’t have an obvious melody. But you liked something about this room – or disliked something about your office in the tower. And you felt so strongly about it that it was worth not only stating a wish, but insisting on it.”

Kankurō shrugged again. “This room mattered to you, in a way that gizzards and geta don’t. I wouldn’t argue with you about something that important. If this is a thing you want, you should have it. I don’t need to understand it.”

That conversation had been eye-opening for Gaara. Perhaps his brother knew the Kazekage’s most profound fear was a return of the egoism that had once ruled his heart. If so, it never occurred to him that they might simply discuss Gaara’s reluctance to impose his will over anyone else’s – it wouldn’t; Kankurō could be even more reserved with his true feelings than Gaara, at times. Instead, being the nimble craftsman that he was, he had spotted a defect and engineered a workaround.

Rather than asking open-ended questions, Kankurō often fished for his brother’s preference by presenting him with discrete choices. Would he rather meet over a meal, or in his office? Would he like sake or soda? Yakisoba or rice? Was the girl with the ash-brown hair prettier than her raven-headed friend? In their conversations with others, he devised opportunities for Gaara to venture an opinion, and closed them again without the least awkwardness when the Kazekage had nothing to say. He rarely voiced his own inclinations until he had at least attempted to secure Gaara’s, and on the rare occasion that they disagreed, Kankurō invariably approached him privately, never obliging him to defend a decision in front of others.

Mindful that Gaara could not, or would not, confess his own desires, even to himself, his brother had set about identifying his preferences and advocating for them in his stead.

It was touching, and it was unsettling. When Gaara considered the many things for which he felt grateful, his brother’s absolute public support always neared the top of the list, but this silent, long-unperceived provision confounded him. The Kazekage had believed that, despite his warped upbringing, he had begun to understand the complex art of the relationship, how to love and accept being loved in return. Kankurō’s devotion made him feel like an infant, totally incapable of comprehending or returning the faithful care given it. How much could he still have to learn, after all these years?

The question was no longer rhetorical.

Gaara frowned at his desk, laden with an assortment of breakfast pastries. It would be best if Kankurō came to him, he knew that much. He shouldn’t force the issue, but his patience was wearing thin, strained to its limits by suspense and frustration. Weeks had passed since he’d first learned of Kankurō’s debilitating illness. Weeks – and still the puppet master kept his own council, still he refused to take Gaara into his confidence, as the headaches grew more frequent, and the food aversions and poor appetite gnawed more greedily at his already-ravaged frame. Kankurō dismissed the latter to his doctor as migraine-related nausea, but Dr. Goya seemed more concerned about his indifference to food than the agonizing headaches. 

In his better moments, Gaara thought his brother simply wished to avoid worrying him. In others, he wondered whether Kankurō had any faith in him at all.

“Morning meeting?” Kankurō asked with a frown from the doorway, raising his brows at the spread on Gaara’s desk. “Workaholic.”

“Said the pot to the kettle,” he replied. “I figured you wouldn’t have had breakfast yet, either.” He tried to sound casual.

Kankurō shook his head. The baggy black costume of the puppet master failed to conceal his brother’s too-thin wrists, and the paint no longer softened the shadows of his hollow cheeks. Gaara wanted him to eat, if he would.

He nodded at the document case his brother carried. “Better to discuss that privately, don’t you think?”

Kankurō shrugged. “As you like,” he said. “I’m not entirely sure what was so secret about it, to be honest. I mean,” he amended, “yes, she’d be a tempting target for certain parties, but Terashima-sama wants us to bring her here, anyway. Her abilities won’t stay secret for long.”

Gaara shook his head. “It’s less  _what_  she can do than  _who_  she’s done it to. The daimyo may not have provided a list of her targets, but death by chakra exsanguination is unusual, and I’ve tracked down a number of recorded incidents.”

“Big names,” Kankurō guessed glumly.

“Perhaps not individually,” he answered, “but you’d recognize a lot of the family names. Terashima-sama is cleverer than he lets on sometimes. The records from the time are so spotty that it would be impossible to defend every assassination she or her team were assigned. I don’t want to bring her here, offer her the protection of the village, and find that I’ve inadvertently placed us all in an untenable situation.”

“You do intend to bring her here, though.”

“Eat,” Gaara instructed, and rose to look out his window.

“You realize Amai-san’s story isn’t unlike mine.” he said finally. “At least the start of it. A child, weaponized for the greater good. I’m sure Terashima-sama recognized instantly that I would have some sympathy for her.”

“She may not have any for us, Gaara.” Kankurō helped himself to a pumpkin-filled pastry, to the Kazekage’s relief. “She hunted shinobi – there’s a strong possibility she would have no interest in joining a Hidden Village.”

“Possibly, but the fact is that Terashima is correct in his surmises. The one thing that might forestall someone like Orochimaru – or even some of the villages – from trying to vivisect her is the threat of large-scale retaliation. And that’s a protection which only the major Hidden Villages can offer her.”

“One of the Villages.” Kankurō’s eyes narrowed shrewdly.

“She was based out of Wind,” Gaara explained. “I imagine her actions were largely directed against Wind’s enemies, but the Daimyo and the Kazekage were bitter rivals, during the Second War, especially. I think we have to assume that some of her marks would have been political agitators from Suna.”

“But we were allied with Konohagakure at the time. She probably wouldn’t have any black marks against her, there.” Kankurō picked up another anpan and chewed thoughtfully. “That’s not a bad thought, little brother.”

“It’s _just_ a thought,” Gaara cautioned. “It would take some doing – even with Naruto. And I’m not altogether sure I would want to pass her off to Konoha, anyway. It’s just that it would be unfortunate to bring her here, only to have one of the councilmen suddenly remember a great uncle who died under mysterious circumstances. There may be less likelihood of encountering that in Konoha.”

“Assuming, again, that she has any interest in being ‘passed off’ to a shinobi village at all.”

Gaara nodded, returned to his chair, and picked up a coconut anpan. “Always assuming that. Still, I want to meet her. Terashima has agreed to wait to waken her from the Stone Sleep until I have arrived. I intend to go next week. And,” he said, catching his brother’s gaze, “I want you to go with me.”

Kankurō’s painted eyes widened only slightly before he glanced away and recovered himself, shielding his dismay behind a mask of nonchalance. He was in no condition to defend his Kazekage; he must either confess the truth or attempt to wriggle out of the assignment.

“That may not be possible,” Kankurō said, after a long pause.

Gaara blew out a breath he hadn’t realize he had been holding, and turned away from the window. “Why not?” he asked.

“It’s fairly involved. We can talk about it tomorrow. I’d like to have ‘til then to figure some stuff out.”

Gaara bit the end of his tongue, irritated. “I suppose…”

“There was something else I wanted to talk to you about, besides. If you’ve got a minute.”

Gaara nodded, disappointed, but curious nonetheless. Kankurō leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and began to tell him about a genin puppeteer he had taken an interest in.

Gaara’s brows rose. “But you don’t like children.”

“This one doesn’t irritate me like most of them do.” Kankurō shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt that she’s a damn genius – I’m pissed off that no one told me about her before, to be honest.”

“A prodigious genin puppeteer?” Gaara tapped a finger on his crossed arms, considering. “Petite, curly-headed girl? Bites her lip?”

Kankurō looked at him with surprise. “Nozara Kumi. You know her?”

He nodded. “It’s tough to remember the kids’ names, but I try. Kumi-chan I know a little better than most. I don't think you were asking my blessing,” he smiled, and Kankurō wagged his brows humorously in response, “but you have it, regardless. It would be a weight off my mind, honestly.”

Kankurō’s fingers laced together. “Because...”

“Because I happen to know that she completed her genin exams with top marks, that her hand seals were the second-best in her year, and her puppetry is leaps and bounds beyond her peers’. I also know that she gloved her hands during her practical exams, so that no one would try to prevent her from taking them.” He leaned back against the wall, fixing his brother with a serious look. “She had three broken bones in one hand, and four in the other, all untreated at the time. After being promoted to genin, she spent the next eight weeks in double casts.”

“How the hell did she break her hands?” Kankurō demanded, aghast. He curled his own fingers protectively into his palms.

“She refused to tell her teachers. I eventually got her to admit that another student had assaulted her, but only on the condition that I wouldn’t investigate further.”

“Wouldn’t… But her _hands_ , for gods’ sakes! Why wouldn’t she want you to pursue that?”

Gaara frowned at him, tempted to ask whether he would have been as upset if the little girl's ribs or jaw had been broken. But Kankurō’s hands remained curled up and drawn close to his body, and he realized he already knew the answer.

Possibly Kumi-chan had felt the same way.

“I tried, Aniki,” he said, his heart sinking with the fear that he had underestimated the trauma suffered by one of his genin.

“I swore to protect her, promised her that the person responsible would be punished. She looked at me like she felt sorry for how simple I was,” he recalled, rueful, “and explained very patiently that none of her classmates had the brains or the malice to have deliberately targeted her hands. Someone had ordered it, someone with enough influence that they had no fear of repercussions.”

Gaara turned to look out the window, suddenly unable to stand still.

“It was a simple matter to track down her assailant,” he said, scanning the street, hoping for a distraction from the crowd outside. “Nozara Gohachiro - her cousin, incidentally - injured her hands, but he hadn't acted alone. I confronted him privately, two weeks after the exams. He confessed on the spot, guilt-ridden and frankly relieved to have it out in the open.”

Outside, there were two genin at the pastry stand, one of the Wakahisa twins, Mariki, he thought, and... damn, the other one was Ban Midori's little brother, the one with the plum-colored eyes... Ban... Ban...

He glanced back at Kankurō, who was watching him intently, silent.

Turning once more to the window, he continued, still trying to think of the boy's name. “Another Nozara clansman drugged her and left her unconscious in an alleyway for Gohachiro, who was supposed to smash her hands with a wooden mallet.”

“A _mallet_! Cripes, Gaara!”

Gaara nodded, impassive. For gods’ sakes, what was the boy’s name?

“She woke up, too disoriented to fight back, and although he threatened her, in the end he couldn't bring himself to do it. He stomped on her hands as hard as he dared and fled.”

“But Kumi-chan was right,” he added coolly.

The children jostled one another jokingly, one pretended to swipe the other’s treat, and they smiled and laughed and were on their way.

“Gohachiro was a petty, mean-spirited child, even a bit of a bully, and he was often particularly cruel to Kumi, as she was younger and smaller and something of a scandal among the Nozara. But name-calling and prank-pulling are a far cry from permanent mutilation.” Despite himself, his teeth ground together.

“It was Nozara Nobu who ordered the attack. Kumi and Gohachiro's common grandfather.”

Nobu was also the head of the Nozara clan, a suspicious-minded war hawk that neither of the brothers had ever held in great esteem. Once, he had been among Rasa's most valued advisors, but if Gaara had possessed any degree of respect for his father’s erstwhile councilor, it had vanished in the face of the very visible bruises on Gohachiro’s trunk and arms.

Kankurō was staring at him in horror. “His own granddaughter?”

“Grandchildren,” Gaara corrected, his anger kindling anew, the puzzle of the little blond genin’s name no longer serving to tamp it down.

“Gohachiro was beaten soundly for having failed to cripple Kumi - even though,” he snorted, “Nobu told him afterward that he never intended for him to follow through. It was a test, he said; he had anticipated Gohachiro's being 'too weak to follow orders.' Nobu meant to rough up his granddaughter and to intimidate her, but he never planned for her to be permanently damaged.”

“Why?” Kankurō asked shortly, barely able to restrain himself, let alone formulate a more cogent question. His mouth was a straight, angry line of purple paint. Gaara could guess at the intended question, though, and tried to explain Nobu's motivations as he understood them.

“Despite her name, Kumi-chan is only Nozara by blood, through her mother. She has no legal ties to the clan. Her father was undeclared, and her mother officially renounced her clan on the day she made chuunin, juridically denying the Nozara any claim to her person or property – or to Kumi. Whatever bad blood lay between them, it lasted to her death. In her final disposition, she made Kumi a ward of the Village, and explicitly prohibited her ever being in the legal custody of any member of the Nozara clan.”

“So, the old bastard was as terrible a father as he is a grandfather,” Kankurō muttered darkly. Half a pumpkin anpan lay forgotten on his knee; Gaara spared a thought to regret having brought up the subject before his brother had finished eating.

“Apparently. At any rate,” he continued, “Kumi-chan came to Nobu's attention last year, about six months before her promotion to genin. She had already been recognized as something of a phenomenon, and he resolved to claim her talents for the Nozara. He began to push for her to be placed under his guardianship. Kumi-chan refused to even consider it, and as her testimony was the only thing that might have been sufficient to challenge her mother's wishes, Nobu's demands went nowhere. He was offended by the rejection, and he punished her.”

“Punished.” Kankurō raked off his hood and ran his hands through his hair, agitated and angry. “The bloody bastard. And there was nothing we could do about it?” he demanded.

Gaara regarded him thoughtfully for a long moment, grateful for the 'we.' Ignorant of Gaara's reasoning, still Kankurō assumed the decision was one he would have supported, and that confidence afforded the Kazekage a peace of mind that had eluded him for months.

“Not directly, no,” he answered finally, with real regret.

He had wrestled with himself for several weeks over how to handle Nobu's intraclan violence, and while he had made some provision for both genin going forward, he had ultimately decided against calling the old man out on his sins. That decision sat ill even now - but both children had unequivocally asked him not to get involved, judging the threat of their grandfather's rage more potent than the Kazekage's ability to protect them. The trouble was that their judgement was probably sound.

“Nozara Nobu is a powerful figure in the conservative faction. Accusing him would open fissures in the Council, pit my allies against some of the most powerful clans in the village, and vilify a genin for following orders – a genin who has already confessed to me and apologized to Kumi. Most importantly,” he said, at Kankurō’s skeptical look, “Nobu would know his grandchildren had crossed him. I'm not sure what he might try, or whether I could prevent or even penalize what he deemed an appropriate response.”

“Not without initiating a helluva power struggle between the central authorities and the various clan heads, at any rate,” Kankurō said, his tone bleak. “I see. Bloody fucking hell.”

“Indeed.”

Kankurō drummed his fingers, thinking. “Why did Kumi-chan's mother renounce her clan? I've heard people make that threat, but I didn't think anyone ever actually followed through with it.”

“It's the only incident that's come up since I've been the Kazekage,” Gaara admitted. “The paperwork doesn't require a justification, and she gave none. You could ask Ajibana Ibuki-san, Kumi's jounin instructor. He was Nozara Rira's teammate, and her friend. He would know more.”

Kankurō’s eyes widened. “Nozara Rira was Kumi's mother?”

“Did you know her?”

“I... no, not to talk to, no. She was a junior of mine, though, and I... I didn't realize she was deceased. So, you placed Kumi-chan with her mother’s former teammate.” Kankurō recovered quickly, and narrowed his eyes as realization struck.

“I also gave her teammates who scored extremely high in protectiveness. One of whom lives in the barracks and moved to the room directly across from hers about eight months back.” He added, with a slight reproof in his voice, “I do try, Aniki.”

Kankurō had the grace to look a little shamefaced, not having assumed Gaara would take what precautions might be taken to ensure the little girl's safety.

“She was under light surveillance as well – a fact I may have dropped in casual conversation with Nozara Nobu,” he added off-handedly. “When she requested it be lifted several months ago, I did _not_ think to mention it to her grandfather.”

“And Gohachiro?” Kankurō demanded. “He doesn’t even get his hands slapped?”

“He got a good deal more than that from Nobu,” Gaara replied darkly. “And to give the boy his due, he has been quietly trying to make his apologies to Kumi. She seems willing enough to let him.” This was true; the wealthy heir-apparent was continually slipping money and small packages to his cousin.

Wary of this new development, Gaara had asked for several of these to be secretly examined, to be sure nothing untoward was going on. One package had contained colorful elastic hairbands wrapped around a couple of one hundred ryo notes, another a small tube of paint, a third a graphic novel, and one a sealed canister of chocolate cookies, with another hundred ryo note wrapped around it. Kumi hadn't seemed troubled by the gifts, and while some cynical part of him feared Nobu might have simply changed tactics, he chose to wait and watch, hoping instead that Gohachiro was showing genuine remorse.

He explained all this to a blatantly skeptical Kankurō, who opined that brightly hued hair accessories and cookies could only be ploys to soften up an unsuspecting victim.

“I’ll ask her about them when she brings me the plans for Little Bird.”

“Let me know if you find out anything,” Gaara requested, willing to leave the issue of the gifts to his brother. He'd learned the joy of delegation long ago, and even beset by illness, Kankurō was invariably reliable. If he was wrong - and Gaara sincerely hoped he was - he would admit as much.

“Is the boy in any danger, do you think?” Kankurō asked reluctantly, too conscientious to ignore a threat to a child, even one who had committed so heinous a crime as attacking a puppeteer's hands.

Gaara raised his hands, unsure. “I hope not. Nobu knows I'm aware of the one beating, although he doesn't know Gohachiro is the one who told me, or that I know how it was earned. I've dropped enough hints that he should know I won't tolerate more, and I've spoken with Gohachiro's sensei. Any evidence of further abuse is to be brought immediately to my attention. I'll raise it with the other Nozara elders if it comes up, but it hasn't, so far. I don't want to start an ideological war over clan autonomy and executive authority if I can avoid it - but I will if I have to.”

“Anyhow,” he concluded, “I will manage the Nozara, one way or another. But if you decide to assume some responsibility for Kumi-chan as her puppetry master, I would only be too happy to have another pair of eyes on her.”

He smiled faintly. Ban Ryōji, that was his name. “Especially eyes as sharp as yours, Aniki.”

“Mmmph.” Kankurō scowled at the floor.

Gaara watched him for a moment, wondering with a pang whether it was his illness that made him suddenly hesitant to dive into the girl’s turbulent personal life. Though, come to think of it, Kankurō’s sudden investment in the girl was curious in itself. Perhaps as both a puppeteer and a budding engineer, Kumi had more in common with Kankurō than most children. Certainly, she was an engaging little thing, but the Kazekage hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said Kankurō disliked kids. He barely tolerated his own nephews – though for their part, both boys gravitated to their uncle’s aloof manner and sarcastic humor. Shikadai emulated him to an alarming degree at times, much to his mother’s dismay.

 “You're not backing off now, are you?” the Kazekage probed gently. “Frightened of a little intraclan drama?”

“Not frightened,” Kankurō answered, defensive. “It's just...” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was flat and toneless. “It's nothing. If anything, I’m the more convinced that she should be apprenticed. She’s got nerve, and that will sometimes take you even further than talent – but she’s got that, too, in spades. No doubt there are people better suited to mentoring her than me, but none of them have my resources or knowledge.”

Gaara didn’t smile at this claim; Kankurō wasn’t a conceited man. When he said he was the best, it was a simple fact.

“Is she as good as you were, at her age?” he asked suddenly, curious.

Kankurō gave him a sour look. “I doubt I could have handled that bird at eleven. She’s probably better,” he answered bluntly. “But don’t tell her I said so. She’s a cocky brat as it is.”

He paused, considering. “That’s maybe not quite fair,” he allowed. “She’s not exactly arrogant. She just knows how good she is, and her best has always been enough, if you know what I mean.”

Gaara shook his head, mute; he did not know.

Kankurō smiled, but the expression was grim. “She got the better of her cousin and her grandfather, but there’s always a bigger fish in the pond. Knowing they’re out there isn’t the same as having lost to one.”

“Ah.” Gaara exhaled and looked back at his window; the children had taken their pastries and gone. “I take your meaning. Even so, I suspect Kumi-chan knows more about big fish and lost causes than most of Suna’s genin. I wish that were not true; I had rather they all remain ignorant for a long while, yet.”

“If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets,” Kankurō quoted, with a rueful expression. Rising abruptly, he trashed the rest of his third, half-eaten anpan. “I'll see you at dinner,” he said, moving to the door, “and we'll talk about going to the Capital to meet Fujimori Amai tomorrow.”


	4. An Exercise in Futility

Kankurō stood outside Nozara Kumi’s door, grinding his teeth in frustration. He had gone in search of her after his discussion with Gaara, but she was nowhere to be found. The barracks admin hadn’t even realized she wasn’t in the building. Though the dullard had managed to climb out of his stupor long enough to call Ajibana for him, and Kumi’s sensei had obligingly provided him with the girl’s phone number, she hadn’t answered either his call or the text message he had sent.

A missing child was not the distraction he had been seeking.

Six months. Six bleeding months, he had managed to conceal his migraines, but with Gaara expecting him to play bodyguard in Shiroiya, the game was up. Kankurō had never once turned down an opportunity to protect his little brother, no matter what he had going on, and Gaara knew perfectly well that Kankurō insisted on handling his security whenever he was obliged to leave the Village.

Much as it pained him to admit it, he was in no condition to do so. And he would tell Gaara the truth, rather than allow him to believe for one minute that anything was more important to Kankurō than his safety. That conversation had always augured badly, but he had counted on the mercy of having it with Gaara alone.

With Temari in town, a disagreeable conversation might deteriorate into total war in a matter of minutes.

He _might_ drive it, if he planned beforehand. Following the bones of a script would keep him focused and less likely to lash out at her inevitable condescension, and returning lucid, ready answers to her endless questions might preserve her equanimity as well. Gaara, thankfully, required no such considerations. His even temper persevered even in the most trying circumstances. Had it been only the brothers, Kankurō could have come clean there in Gaara’s office, but he didn’t mean to go through this hell more than once.

Positive there was a migraine in his immediate future – he’d been ferociously thirsty all morning – neither did he mean to bring it up at dinner. If he had to spend the evening curled up in a ball of agony, he sure as hell wasn’t going to do it with an audience, and he doubted either of his siblings would be persuaded to leave him suffering in peace. He would put them off for one more night. Tomorrow, after the migraine abated and he’d slept off the resulting fatigue, he would have to face the music.

Bloody migraines. Bloody Terashima. Bloody chakra-sucking murderers. Bloody Fujimori.

Bloody Nozara Rira, for that matter. Bloody beautiful Nozara Rira.

How long had it been since Mitsuo Tamaki’s raven-headed little friend had crossed his mind?

Kankurō and Tamaki had been in the same year during their Academy days, and Kankurō had been invited to attend Tamaki’s jounin promotion celebration. He remembered little of the party, but what he did recall from that evening was well worth remembering. Silky black curls twisting round his fingers, and a laughing mouth, sweetened by potent plum wine. They danced; he kissed her wine-stained mouth and led her off into the moonlight. When he woke, she was gone.

And that had been the end of it. Kunoichi at that age either married, surrendering their careers to motherhood, or they took their passion on the run, as so many of their male counterparts did. As Kankurō always had. Rira hadn’t pursued him, had never contacted him again.

But cripes, who would have guessed Kumi was her daughter?

And her father? Where was he? Undeclared, Gaara had said, but surely not unknown. Had he rebuffed her when she told him, opting out of fatherhood like a blasted cell phone update? Or had she simply chosen to keep her peace, deeming the man so unworthy that he didn’t merit the courtesy of knowing he had a daughter?

In either case, it hadn’t mattered. Rira was dead. If Kumi’s father did know about her, he hadn’t come forward to claim her. The little girl had been left alone, with a vengeful clan to harry her and an indifferent dormitory admin to see that she checked in before ten o’clock. There was no one to remind her to floss or to rinse the varnish out of her paintbrushes or to see that she ate more than convenience store meals. No one to give a damn where she went or what she did, or whether she ever came home. She came and went as she pleased, missed by no one, answerable to no one, dependent upon no one.

Precious to no one.

The thought of the tiny cat-eyed child pinned down in some shadowy alley, dazed and powerless, infuriated him. A single blow from Gohachiro’s mallet could have mutilated her remarkable hands, splintering the fine metacarpals of her narrow palms and crushing the interphalangeal joints of her slim fingers, destroying a once-in-a-generation prodigy. A genin’s booted foot had produced force enough to break seven bones. But as sickening as the attack itself had been, the true atrocity was that no one had known.

She’d gone home. Wrapped her hands as best she could. And got on with it, unaided and alone.

His brother had implied that no one noticed her injuries during her exams the following day. To have been so badly injured and yet perform as she had, to have concealed the pain well enough that her exam proctors hadn’t suspected, that had taken something more than genius. With nothing but her own skill and grit, she had defied one of the most powerful men in Suna.

Kankurō wouldn’t have dared risk further damage to his hands, just to make a point.

Well – probably not.

Well, actually, yeah, he was stubborn enough that he might have tried. But it would have been unforgivably stupid, and he wouldn’t have gotten away with it, anyway. Temari would have stopped him. Obstinate and surly and probably ungrateful, still, even _he_ was precious to someone.  

Suddenly and unaccountably angry, Kankurō banged his fist on the locked door, bristling like a cat. How could no one know where this little girl was? It was unconscionable.

He opened his fists and stared blankly at his hands, splayed out on the unyielding door, trying to guess at where she might have disappeared to.

And then he stopped breathing.

Kankurō’s hands were large and elegant, with long palms and supple fingers which ended in neatly clipped, perfectly oval nails. Water hands, Lady Chiyo had called them. Artist’s hands.

Ambidextrous hands.

Bloody fucking hell.

When had Tamaki made jounin? Fifteen years ago? Thirteen? When was it that he had slipped off into the water gardens with a curvy, curly-headed chuunin, drunk on plum wine?

Nozara would have told him. Fuck’s sake, the kid was living in the bleeding barracks. Right? She wouldn’t have made Kumi a ward of the Village, had there been any other choice. No one just let that happen to their kid.

He glanced at his hands again, considering, trying to reason himself out of this sudden paranoia. They didn’t  _look_  anything alike, he and Kumi. If her kittenish features didn’t much resemble her mother’s sweet, pixie-like face, they certainly didn’t reflect his heavier brow or broader jaw. Her slight build, porcelain skin and black hair were all Rira, and the pale green of her eyes wasn’t far removed from Rira’s hazel. But her hands….

He _noticed_ hands. Always had. And he remembered Rira’s perfectly. They had been tiny, almost doll-like, as they glided down his neck and chest on their way to other, more interesting places. Utterly unlike her mother’s, with their squarish palms and small, sure fingers, Kumi’s hands were fluid and willowy, tapered at the fingertips and long through the palm, like his own. And she used them both with like facility.

A considerable subset of the shinobi population cultivated ambidexterity as a skill, but how many people had he ever met who had been born with equally deft hands, as he had been? Two? Possibly three? None of them had hailed from Suna.

And that wasn’t the only thing they shared.

Kumi possessed not only a talent, but a passion for puppetry. Sasori of the Red Sand and Lady Chiyo were the only individuals he had ever known to love their art as viscerally as he did – until Ajibana sent him the little cat-eyed genin with her beautifully crafted puppet. He had been drawn to her almost from the minute he met her, so much so that after a single night’s conversation, he had nearly resolved to apprentice her – to enter a seven-year binding contract with a not-quite-eleven-year-old girl.

No wonder Gaara had looked so surprised.

He forced himself to breathe again, as spots flared in his vision. They shared an uncommon ability, that was all, he told himself firmly. And it was all very easy to sort. Promotions were public record. It would be a simple thing to check the date of Tamaki’s celebration, and he already knew Kumi’s birthday was the following week. He only had to do the math.

But while the prospect of action calmed his nerves, Kankurō’s mood remained dark as he left the barracks. Until recently, his life had been quiet and well-ordered. His personal affairs had never interfered with his duties. His sole concern should have been keeping Gaara protected in Shiroiya while the Kazekage considered the Daimyo’s peculiar request to take a former assassin under his wing.

Instead he had to figure out how to inform his over-bearing sister and his quieter, but equally solicitous brother about an un-diagnosable illness without sending them both into a panic. And instead of doing _that_ , he was traipsing off to the Hall of Records to dig up Tamaki’s promotion date and definitively discount the possibility that he had fathered a child and remained ignorant of her existence for over a decade.

Bloody _fucking_ hell.

The nation’s eponymous wind tugged spitefully at him as he made his way down the street, glowering at the ground. Maybe he was only imagining it, uncomfortably aware that, this time last year, he’d had several kilos more to buoy him against the gales of early winter. He was not imagining the chill he felt, though it was probably better than twenty degrees outside.

The Hall of Records dominated the western edge of the Village’s central square. To one side stood the entrance to the Vaults of the Honored Dead, a massive doorway cut from solid sandstone. Suna ninja buried their fallen deeply underground, in rock-cut tombs, to protect them from the rise and fall of the oases water tables and the shifting sands of the desert beyond. The tunnels that comprised the Vaults ran deep beneath the Suna, in long arteries extending from the Records Hall southward toward Command, where Gaara’s small, street-level office faced one of the thoroughfares leading into heart of the Village; toward the Theatre in the north; and toward the Academy, which symbolically anchored the eastern side of the square.

The rising future in the east, and their ancestors in the west, and between them, the Puppeteer Corps and the central government. As it had been from Suna’s founding.

It was an impressive sight, but Kankurō didn’t spare a thought for the historic buildings or their figurative placement as he hurried up the stairs to the Hall, intent on his purpose. The female clerk at the counter smiled pleasantly at him; he bobbed an absent nod in return.

“The jounin promotion records from… ah, probably 3349 to 3355, please.”

He exhaled, concentrating on his breathing. Kumi would be eleven next week, so she’d been born in late December of 3352… nine months prior to that would have been March? Possibly early April.

The clerk answered with a brief nod and disappeared into the stacks, returning a minute or two later with a pair of slim volumes. She adjusted her glasses – pretty blue eyes, Kankurō noted distractedly – and tapped one of the books.

“’49 is in here, and this is 3350 to 3359.” She smiled again, and this time he didn’t miss the way her eyes lingered on him.

Ill, anxious, cross – still, he was a man first. He gave her a wink and was rewarded with rosily flushed cheeks and lowered eyes. “I’ll be right over here, if you need me,” she said and walked – very conscientiously, Kankurō noticed with a crooked grin – back toward the stacks.

He flopped into one of the lobby chairs and began to thumb through the last pages of the first volume. He doubted Tamaki’s promotion had been quite that long ago, but it didn’t hurt to check. Tamaki’s name didn’t appear in the register, so he picked up the second book, and after a few minutes, found Mitsuo Tamaki’s Achievement of Jounin Rank, May 18, 3352.

Same year, but too late. That was… actually, he realized, as a brief sense of relief faded, actually, that didn’t prove anything.

If Kumi had been conceived in March, her mother had been drinking a hell of a lot of alcohol for a woman two months gone with child. Not to mention sleeping with men she’d just met. Perhaps she had just been that kind of careless, thoughtless person.

Or perhaps she hadn’t been pregnant at the time.

Swallowing hard, Kankurō waved at the clerk. “I found what I was looking for – but would you mind pulling something else for me?” His voice sounded normal, but it felt as if it were clawing its way up from his throat.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I’m thinking of taking on an apprentice,” he explained. “I’d like to get a look at her birth certificate.”

“Easy,” she said, giving him another flirty smile and perching on the edge of the end table beside him. He didn’t manage a response, this time, and her smile faltered a bit. She stood upright and withdrew a few paces, flushing.

“Ahem… What’s the name?”

“Nozara Kumi.”

“Alright, one moment.” Back to business, the pretty young woman once again vanished into the massive shelves that housed Suna’s history.

“Here you go.” She returned after only a moment, and handed him a dusty sheet of paper with an impossibly small footprint stamped into one corner. “Nozara Kumi.”

He bowed slightly, feeling a little bad for not flirting back; she really was very cute. Then he glanced through Kumi’s certificate of birth.

 

Nozara Kumi                      Born 21 December 3352

Mother: Nozara Rira           Father: Undeclared

Length: 41 cm                    Weight: 1.18 kg

Blood type: AB

 

Kankurō blinked and looked again. 1.18 kg.

Premature, his brain supplied sluggishly. Very.

A chill slid up his spine, even as his mind rebelled against the paper in his hands. It didn’t prove anything, he reminded himself forcefully. Just another bloody coincidence, yeah? He might have been one of several before an unexpected pregnancy put an end to Nozara Rira’s wine-soaked romances.

His heart beat a deafening rhythm in his ears, refusing to be calmed. He forced himself to breathe normally, thinking quickly.  The dates were inconclusive, but was there something else he could use?

“Are you alright? Only you look a little pale,” the clerk said, glancing up from her desk, brows furrowed with concern.

He gathered himself and shoved his sudden panic into a locked room at the back of his mind.

“I’ve been a bit under the weather, actually.” He raised the document. “Could I bother you for just a couple more things, please – Nozara Kumi and Nozara Rira’s service records?”

Their basic information would be listed there – birthdate, emergency contacts, number of missions completed – and, crucially, Rira’s blood type.

If Kumi’s blood type was an uncommon AB+, her parents’ blood types could be anything but O, so long as one of them had an A protein and the other had a B protein. Type A was very common, type B – Kankurō’s blood type – less so. If Rira’s blood had been type B, then Kumi’s father had provided the A protein in her blood – something Kankurō could not possibly have done. Any other type would be inconclusive, but if Rira’s blood type happened to be A – well, only about one in ten people had type B blood.

He gritted his teeth, waiting impatiently while the attractive clerk fetched the requested documents.

“Thanks,” he said when she returned, making a conscious effort not to snatch the folders from her. He laid open Rira’s service record and scanned her personal details at the top of the first page.

A+.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

After making a show of thumbing through the folders for a moment longer, he handed both back to the clerk.

“You’ve been a big help. Thanks.” He flashed a smile, hoping it looked sincerer than it felt.

“Well, sure,” she replied, blushing prettily. “Let me know if I can help with anything else, alright?”

“You bet. Have a good one, yeah?”

He strode through the doors purposefully, but stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the Hall. Hands in his pockets, he looked over Suna’s rooftops and towers, into the golden expanse of desert beyond, breathing slowly.

What the hell was he supposed to do next?

 

 

It irked him to waste his time, when he knew perfectly well that he would be good for nothing come evening, but in the end, he opted for sleep. Gaara’s summons had wakened him after only two hours’ rest, and now, ambushed by the nightmarish prospect of unwitting fatherhood and the necessity of revealing his debilitating migraines to his siblings, both mind and body rebelled against further action. Even so, it took a good deal of pharmacological assistance to smother his jangled nerves into insensibility.

He woke in his bed, dry-mouthed and grainy-eyed, five hours later. His cell phone blinked to indicate missed messages, and after a bleary squint at the damn thing, he snatched it up. Temari and Gaara had both texted him – he was late for dinner – and Kumi had answered his text message several hours prior. Ignoring Temari’s four messages, berating him for his tardiness, and Gaara’s single _Where are you,_ he opened Kumi’s.

_I’m sorry I missed your call. Did you need something?_

Exhaling slowly, torn between a surprising relief that the kid was okay, irritation with her disappearance, and the panic banging on the locked door in his mind, he texted her back. _Nothing that won’t wait._

There was no response. He scowled at the phone for a moment.

_Answer your damn messages, brat._

Then, to Gaara: _Got tied up with something. See you in fifteen minutes._

His paint was still mostly intact, but he touched up the edges of it, squeezed some anti-redness drops into his eyes, and briefly debated swapping his usual hood for a hooded cowl with a neck gaiter. It would stand higher over his shoulders, hiding most of his neck and jaw, and perhaps between it and the white face paint, Temari might underestimate how much weight he’d lost. He decided against it.  New paint was already noteworthy, and too many changes were inadvisable. He did opt for a solid black tee to wear under his haori, rather than the more revealing, fitted mesh he preferred.

Eying himself warily in the mirror, displeased but unsure what more he could do, he sighed and went to meet his brother and sister, mentally preparing himself to disappear.

It was usually easy with his siblings; all the had to do was to feign his ordinary obstinate and irritable demeanor, circumvent silences and redirect unwanted attention. At the moment, his body was conspiring against him with waves of nausea and the first pangs of a brutal migraine. Still, he thought he could carry it off through dinner. Accustomed to being unnoticed, he had developed something of a talent for obscurity.

Neither the heir apparent, nor the jinchuuriki, Rasa’s middle child had been almost shamefully overlooked until his tenth year, when the Fourth finally admitted to himself that his first-born would never succeed him as Kazekage. She simply was not twisted enough for it. Temari spoke the truth as she understood it and possessed neither talent nor patience for political doublespeak. And while she was highly intelligent, efficient, and pragmatic, she lacked the ruthless objectivity her father had personified.

A solid point in her favor, as far as Kankurō was concerned.

Kankurō, who possessed both the subtlety and the brutality his sister lacked, had finally received his father’s attention. If the sudden transference of time and energy to her younger brother had hurt or confused her, Temari never complained.  Kankurō had – often and loudly.  From that time until his death, the Fourth personally oversaw Kankurō’s taijustsu training – and he had been an unforgiving master. He had interceded with Chiyo for his middle son, obtaining some of Sasori’s relics. And he had shipped him off to Shiroiya for four consecutive summers to be tutored in politics, economics, and history. It might have been gratifying, once.

But the time his notice had been wanted was long past: the years of parental disregard had left their mark. The solemn-eyed boy had already learned not to value what he could not have, and to cherish what he did. He wasn’t neglected – he had autonomy. He wasn’t alone – he had privacy. Most importantly, he had come to understand that the only validation that mattered, the only agency that ought to direct his path, and the only power on which he could rely were his own.

At age six, he had joined a second family in the Puppeteer Corps, and it was from that hotheaded bunch he had learned to converse, to lead, to collaborate, to judge others. But while he had grown socially adept under their rowdy and often crass guidance, the wounding indifference he suffered at his father’s hands had ultimately fostered a self-sufficient and intensely private man, a man who could deflect notice as easily as he dodged kunai.

It was this talent, coupled with a predilection for solitude, which so drew him to puppetry.  Bunraku puppeteers worked side-by-side with their puppets, in full view of the audience.  Yet their props commanded such attention that they melted into the shadows, as inconsequential as scenery.  No one remembered the living, breathing men on stage, though they could describe in detail the kimono worn by the heroine, or the style of her hair. 

On the battlefield, his most loyal comrades demanded even more attention than their thespian counterparts.  They dominated the field while he kept backstage, all but invisible behind a flurry of animated wood and steel.  Making teammates of puppets forced him to rely on himself, but he preferred it that way.  Puppets never questioned his commands.  They never behaved unexpectedly, and they didn’t have moods or crises of conscience.  Better yet, unlike a teammate – or a sibling –puppets could not be killed. 

There was a morbid sort of irony to it in the end, but Kankurō had a fine appreciation for satire, and his sense of the comedic tended toward the macabre, anyway.  It had never been lost on him that he had been groomed for a role he would never take, or that he performed his chosen part for people who would not see him, making allies of dolls that could not love him. His entire life was an exercise in futility, he thought, grinning sardonically as the restaurant came into view.

When he arrived, forty minutes late, Temari spotted him first and pursed her lips in disapproval. The expression never failed to remind Kankurō of their mother. He hadn’t been very old when she died, but he had pictures, and he’d seen a few videos of her. Temari occasionally called to mind what little he had gleaned from those images. Trivial gestures she made, turns of phrase she used, sometimes even her voice called up Karura’s ghost.

If she was bossy and patronizing – and oh, she was – Temari also resembled her mother in her utter devotion to her family. Whether they were wanted or not, her care and her support were as faithful as the sun’s rising.  Despite her sour look and his reluctance to reveal how changed he was, he found he was happy to see her. He ignored her irritation and smiled warmly at her.

“Seriously?” she asked, when he sat down. “One meal, I asked for one nice meal out with my brothers, and you’re half an hour late?”

“Sorry, sorry.” He waved away the complaint, choosing not to argue just yet. He glanced at Gaara, who shrugged slightly, as if to say he’d brought this on himself.  “I just lost track of the time. How you been?”

“Keeping busy.” She rolled her eyes. “Mostly by finding the self-restraint not to strangle my son.”

Kankurō chuckled. “He’s been causing you problems?”

“He’s just so… ugh.” She threw her hands in the air. “He doesn’t listen – or at least he chooses not to respond – he’s rude and disobedient and...” Temari glared at the elder of her two brothers. “Actually, he’s a lot like you,” she said tartly, jabbing a finger at Kankurō.

“Poor kid’s probably just on edge from the never-ending nagging,” Kankurō jibed back. “I’ve always thought Nara must have the patience of a saint.”

Temari flushed hotly, but before she could respond, Kankurō reached over and patted her head condescendingly. “I’ll talk to him, next time I’m out that way,” he said, only half-teasing. “Even tough guys should respect their moms. Maybe he’ll listen – he likes _me_ , after all.”

“Jerk,” she muttered. “I’m _not_ a nag.” Straightening her shoulders, she fixed him with a steely gaze. “I ordered oyakudon for you – and you had better eat it all. You look like a ghost with that white face paint. What is wrong with you anyway? You’ve lost weight – aren’t you eating properly?”

Gaara had to look away to avoid smiling. Kankurō didn’t bother and laughed out loud. After a moment, his sister’s mouth twisted in a rueful smile, and she laughed reluctantly along with him.

“Alright – that was maybe a little overbearing,” she conceded.

“So was ordering for me,” he grinned, “but lucky you, oyakudon sounds great.”

Inwardly he cringed. Thoroughly nauseated, as he inevitably became in the hours before a migraine hit, even the aromas in the restaurant threatened his self-control. He’d be lucky if he made it through dinner before the migraine descended. And although he had succeeded in redirecting Temari’s attention the once, he probably wouldn’t escape it a second time.

They chatted awhile about nothing in particular, until the waiter appeared with their dinner. Kankurō poked the egg in his oyakudon, unable to dispel the thought that he’d be seeing it again very soon. His already-queasy stomach churned ominously, and he set his chopsticks down. He didn’t want to be sick tonight.

Well, he only had to stall for one more evening. He didn’t really want to pick a fight with Temari – but it might buy him a few –

Ding ding!

_Sorry. Training with team. I have Little Bird’s drafts for you._

_When do you finish?_

_7:30._

_Bring them to the office afterward._

_OK_

When he looked up, Temari’s eyes had narrowed into dangerous green slits. “Do _not_ look at your phone at the table.”

Saved by the bell, he thought, sending a grateful thought in Kumi’s direction. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he answered, his tone deliberately sharp.

They glared at each other, a nice little fight brewing between them. Before he could fan the flames, though, Gaara undercut him by asking mildly, “Who was that, Kankurō?”

He bit his tongue, his escape route thwarted. “Nozara Kumi.”

“Kumi?” Temari’s eyes brightened, and she set her irritation aside in favor of gossip. Damn the luck. “What’s this – are you finally dating someone?”

Gaara hid another smile behind his sleeve at his brother’s look of appeal, but having been on the wrong end of Temari’s merciless matchmaking efforts once or twice himself, he came to Kankurō’s rescue, despite his amusement.

“Kumi-chan is a genin puppeteer whom Kankurō is considering as an apprentice,” he explained.

“But you don’t like kids.” Innocently echoing Gaara’s initial reaction, Temari looked at her brother in surprise. “Or teaching, for that matter. Didn’t you give up a position at the Academy after just a year?”

Kankurō shuddered. “Don’t remind me. Worst decision I ever made was teaching that class. My one success was that I didn’t kill anyone. Although,” he admitted grudgingly, “I guess some of them were alright individually. It’s when they get together that they’re so noisy and whiney and obnoxious.”

“Any parent could tell you that.” Temari looked at him with bald speculation. “Still, she must be pretty spectacular to have caught your interest.”

“She’s very talented as a puppeteer, but she also designs puppets.” Gaara smiled faintly. “It was the lark puppet that really caught his eye, I think; not Kumi-chan.”

“Not true,” he found himself disagreeing, queerly defensive on Kumi’s behalf. His smothered panic threatened to smash through the door he had slammed over it.

“The bird is like nothing I’ve ever seen, yeah, but to have worked out that design, and to master the technique to fly it, and the jutsus to fly it remotely, that –”

“Remotely?” Temari leaned forward with interest. Apparently, yawning through most of his ramblings about puppetry over the years didn’t mean she hadn’t been listening.

“Yes, remotely. I almost fell out of my chair.”

Although he had little desire to think about Nozara Kumi and the misgivings he had regarding her, Little Bird and apprenticeship proved adequate conversational fare, as he could discuss them with enough animation to stave off further comments regarding his health. Supplying the bulk of the conversation also allowed him to pick at his food, so that by the time Gaara and Temari were nearly finished, he had taken little enough to avoid further aggravating his stomach. Unfortunately, it was not enough to avoid aggravating his sister.

“That’s not all you’re going to eat, surely.” Temari’s brow furrowed with concern.

“Take it easy, Mom.  I just ran my mouth too long,” he answered easily. “I’ll take it home.” He would, though the odds of his actually eating the leftovers were slim to none.

“No wonder you look so bloody thin,” she exclaimed.

“I’ll finish it at home,” he enunciated, with a long-suffering groan – which was entirely sincere. The payment for the falsehood would be steep. And thanks to Gaara’s damned mission to Shiroiya, the bill came due tomorrow.

“Yeah, I bet you will,” she answered, eyes flashing. “Right after finishing a mountain of work and fiddling with your damned puppets until you pass out, you will.”

He snorted a laugh – the screws of a migraine were tightening in his head, but if that hadn’t been the case, his sister’s prediction would have been laughably accurate.

“Aniki can take care of Aniki,” Gaara said, with a small, tolerant shake of his head. Kankurō gave him a crooked smile to cover his sinking stomach. He didn’t like lying to Temari. He abhorred lying to Gaara.

Then he looked up sharply.  Years later, ‘Aniki’ still sounded strange coming from his stiff, sensitive little brother, if he thought about it too long. But odd as it was, the term was reserved for private use.  In public, the siblings simply used one another’s names; even in formal settings Gaara did not wish for Temari and Kankurō to address him as Kazekage.

But calling him Aniki in public – what did that signify?

Temari’s green eyes slid back and forth between her brothers uncertainly; she had also been put on guard by Gaara’s strange address. She pursed her lips at Kankurō, and his smile faltered, despite his best efforts. It was time to wriggle out of the rest of the evening.

Maybe a dose of truth was in order?

He rubbed at his temples, grimacing.

“Headache?” Gaara asked, sympathetic.

“Yeah. Didn’t get enough sleep last night.” He looked up with a wry smile and raised a brow. “Someone woke me up early.”

“I did apologize for that,” Gaara replied, unperturbed. “But if you’re not feeling well, perhaps you should go home.”

Thankful for Gaara’s predictability, he nodded, feigning reluctance. “Y’know, I might just.”

“I have some aspirin,” Temari offered, dipping her fingers into her pouch.

“Nah, I took some on the way here. Doesn’t seem to be helping.” He wished he _had_ thought of the little bottles in his medicine cabinet; in his rush to get to dinner, he had forgotten. This was going to be a bad one.

He flagged down a server to request a carryout box and began haphazardly dumping his dinner into it.

“Oh, for pity’s…” Temari sighed and reached over him to collect his dishes and the carryout box, trying to correct the mess he’d made of it. Muttering to herself, she fitted the plastic lid to the aluminum tray. “Here. Go home and get some sleep. _After_ you eat.”

He nodded, slightly, the screws of the migraine twisting with a sudden viciousness. Steeling himself, he stood and looked down at his sister.

“Sorry to cut this short,” he said, sincerely. “I’ll make it up to you.” Then, quietly, he asked, “Gaara’s planning on a trip here soon – did you know?”

Glancing around, she nodded – they usually tried to keep his journeys under wraps until the last possible moment. Otherwise the Village went mad with sudden fires that had to be extinguished before he could leave.

“We were going to meet up to talk about it tomorrow. Later, rather than sooner,” he added, with a look at his brother for confirmation. “I’ve got several things to take care first. Dinner at my house?”

Her mouth twisted with suspicion, but then she huffed a small laugh. “Only if you promise not to cook.”

“I’ll order in,” he assured her. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the theatre.  “I’ve got to pick up Kumi’s drafts, but I’m heading home straight after, if you need me.  Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kankurō,” Gaara replied quietly.

“See you tomorrow.”  Temari gave him her “sister” smile, ironic and knowing and condescendingly indulgent and inexplicably tender.  It was wholly unlike her mother’s, but it was one of the smiles he treasured most in the world.

Gaara’s lips twitched at him with the other.

He rapped the table in parting and, hands in his pockets, not daring to look back, he fled.


	5. Oogie

_Sensei is keeping us late, but I can put them under your door or bring them by tomorrow._

_I’ll wait._

Kumi turned off her screen, not sure whether to be excited or a little weirded out by Kankurō-dono’s eagerness to see her plans. He was a decent man, though, everyone said so. Bad-tempered, but on the level.

More importantly, he was the best puppeteer of his generation, and the best puppet crafter since Sasori of the Red Sand. So weird or not, his attention was a gift she couldn’t overlook.

"Kumi-chan!"

Ban Ryōji came over the field, where Kumi was putting away her gear. Ajibana-sensei had finally dismissed them, after an extended training session. Though he had complimented their technique, he shared more than one meaningful look with Seichi and Hachiuma, a look that invariably meant, "Watch Kumi."

She scowled to herself over her water bottle, but managed to compose her face by the time Ryōji joined her.

"Hey," she said, hoping she didn't sound as angry as she felt.

"Hi. Some of us were going to get noodles - did you want to go?"

"I can't today," she demurred, though her stomach gnawed at her. After months of clawing out time and money, she had nearly finished a new design - her Boom Bugs - but she needed the lathe in the theatre's machine shop. There was only a tech on hand until nine, and, as a genin, she wasn't permitted to use the shop tools without supervision.

"Maybe next time?" He looked genuinely disappointed, so she gave him a smile.

"I don't like making promises, but I'll try."

"Okay. Here, Gohachiro-senpai asked me to give this to you." He handed her a cardboard box stamped with the dango vendor's logo, and she took it with thanks.

"I didn't know you liked dango," Ryōji said, frowning. Not for the first time, Kumi wondered whether the tall blonde boy might have a crush on her. She hoped not. Nearly every girl in her year liked Ryōji; it could only cause trouble if it turned out he had a thing for her.

"Everybody likes dango, Ryōji-kun," she replied absently, lifting the lid to display three skewers of Hanami dango. Gohachiro had swapped the pink and white balls.

During her Academy days, it had been easy to work out a code with her cousin – he always knew where she would be and could easily position himself to shout one of a handful of specific insults at her. After she graduated, they’d had to get more creative.

She knew perfectly well his suggestion of using gifts to communicate appeased his conscience a bit. The injuries to her hands really had devastated him. Kumi hadn’t been thrilled either, but, as her mother had always said, needs must.

"Okay,” Ryōji was saying, “well, if you change your mind..."

"I really wish I could. But I've got to get to the machine shop. Thanks for inviting me - and for delivering this for Gohachiro-senpai."

"Kumi-chan, about Go -"

"Gotta run, thanks again!"

Before he could – for the umpteenth time – disparage her cousin as conniving, or unkind, or dangerous, she flashed a bright smile, heaved Naruki over her shoulder, and took off at a dead run. It had been easy for Gohachiro to play the bad guy at first – after all, he had plenty of experience. But it wore on him now, to be constantly perceived as a bully and a threat. Hopefully it would be worth it.

Full dark had descended by the time she reached the theatre gates. When she rapped at Kankurō’s office door, the puppet master answered it on the first knock.

“You are a tough kid to find,” he said, though without the ill-humor she might have expected.

“Sorry,” she said, dipping into a quick bow of contrition. “I’m not really used to being looked for, I guess.”

He looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then his eyes fell to the large art folio under her arm. “Those them?”

“Yes, sir.” Handing them up, she stepped back into the hallway.

“See?” He cocked his head sideways. “Better to under-promise and overdeliver.”

Kumi nodded. “You can call me, if you have any questions… I’m used to drawing for myself, so they’re readable, but that’s about the best I can say for them,” she apologized.

“We’ll have to work on that,” he murmured, thumbing through the file. “There’s a lot in here,” he said with surprise. “Any prototypes for these?”

“Other than Little Bird?” She considered. “The bat, but I told you about him. The spider puppets are fully functional. There are a couple of humanoid puppets I have pieced and strung, but I haven’t had a chance to test them much. I’ll have a working model of the scorpion by this weekend. Most of the others are pretty much daydreams, for now – oh, except for Naruki, of course. Mom built her, but I marked all my additions.”

Kankurō was shaking his head. “Take those out.” He handed the folio back to her.

Confused, she flipped through the pages and withdrew Naruki’s plans.

Kankurō’s mouth twitched, and he reached to tap Naruki’s head. “She’s your combat puppet, right? Told you I’d show you Karasu if you’d show me Naruki. Wouldn’t be fair for me to look at all her secrets before she had a chance to show them off, right? I’d rather see her in action.”

“Oh!” Surprised, she asked, “Did you want a demonstration? Or to watch a practice?”

“No. You and me, we’ll spar. Saturday, if you don’t have anything going on.”

“You…” She couldn’t stop the idiotic grin spreading over her face. “You want to spar with me?”

He smiled faintly in return. “Maybe you’ll show me your prototypes then, too.”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Alright, kid. Goodnight.”

“‘Night.”

When he had closed the door, she hugged herself tightly and smothered a scream, stamping her feet in uncontainable excitement. Not only was she going to see Karasu, she was going to face him, one-on-one. Well, one-on-four, technically, but Kankurō-dono wouldn’t know that.

She ran back down the hall, toward the machine shop, her mind in a blur. Would her murder impress as Little Bird had? He wouldn’t think it was a cheap trick, would he?

It wasn’t, after all. No one else in her year could manage so many puppets. Concealing them inside Naruki just gave her an element of surprise. No cheap tricks there – or, at least, no more than any other puppeteer who ever hid a weapon. Kankurō’s own beloved Karasu was notoriously ever-changing; aside from his outer appearance, little of Sasori’s original work remained. Little of last year’s model remained, if what she’d heard was true, except for the collaborative elements that allowed it to create combination attacks with its fellows.

She was mentally reviewing everything she knew about the puppet master and his deadly comrades when she came to the machine shop. The door was locked, and the lights were out, even though it was only eight o’clock.

Angry with Ajibana-sensei for keeping them late, angry with Ryōji-kun for delaying her further, she slammed the flats of her fists on the locked door.

"Seriously?" She demanded of an empty hallway. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" Her fists punctuated her words.

"Hey."

Whirling on her heel, she saw that Kankurō had followed her into the hall. He was leaning against the brick wall and staring at her. Her folio dangled from one hand.

"Kankurō-dono! Um…" She looked guiltily at the door.

"I was on my way home. Thought you were, too.” He gestured. “What'd that door ever do to you?"

"Ah..." She bit her lip. "Shop's supposed to be open ‘til nine, but I guess no one was using it, and the tech must have gone home early."

Kankurō nodded slowly. "What d'you need?"

"The micro-lathe."

He grimaced. "For how long?"

Kumi considered. "An hour... and a half," she added quickly, remembering his admonishment not to overpromise.

"Alright." He walked toward her, a little unsteady on his feet, as if he were drunk. As he moved closer, though, she could see the tension in his shoulders. He was in pain, she realized, somewhat taken aback.

"Uh..."

He withdrew a key from one of his pockets and handed it to her.

"I have," he said flatly, setting her folio down next to the door, "the mother of all migraines. I'm going to sit there," he pointed to a pair of chairs further down the corridor, "and wait for you, just in case you happen to amputate a finger, yeah? If you do, for the love of all that's holy, don't yell. Pick it up and bring it to me, and we'll get you to the hospital."

"I will - thank you, thank you, thank you!" she whispered, trying to avoid aggravating his headache.

"Mmmph." The puppet master walked slowly away and settled into one of the chairs, immediately dropping his head into his hands, covering his eyes to shield them from the light.

Kumi slipped quietly into the shop, unable to believe her luck. She had the whole shop to herself, and her thirty-two bits of steel would soon be the final leg segments – tiny claws – for her Boom Bugs. These were the last of her unshaped pieces; as soon as this was done, she could fit them together. If she worked through the night, she might be able to practice with them a bit before training with her team. Although the general technique wasn't much different than her other spider puppets, and in some ways easier because of their larger size, the Boom Bugs were modeled on scorpions, and the segmented tails and pincered pedipalps presented new complications.

She had finished most of her ungues when Kankurō came in, still holding her art folio. He looked terrible, but as she started to rise, he waved her down.

"It's fine, kid. You've only been in here forty-five minutes. I decided I needed a fucking distraction when I began to seriously consider the benefits of detaching my head."

“I can do this later.” Kumi rose instantly, but the veteran puppeteer grimaced.

"Being here or at home won’t make any difference. A distraction might. Tell me you need help with something."

Biting her lip, torn between wanting to show him a finished product on Saturday and a desire to be helpful, she stood and held out her hand, offering him the twenty-four ungues she had just shaped, along with a leg she had already wired for testing.

Scorpion legs were complex structures of eight segments, and these ungues were their terminal ends, two tiny claw-like structures for each leg. The pieced leg was needle-thin and stretched no longer than her pinkie finger.

"I have these claws I just shaped. The joints have to be smooth, so I was going to polish them later. But if you’d like to do that…?"

He lifted her hand to better view the small limb. "This is wonderful," he said simply. "For the almost-completed scorpion, I assume?"

Kumi nodded, glowing. Kankurō was notoriously difficult to impress, and she had done it twice, now.

“Ambitious, for a genin.”

“Nah,” she said, smiling modestly. “Mom fought with a spider-type puppet, so I cut my teeth on arachnids.”

He lifted the nearly-completed leg and toyed the terminal end, watching the segments curl up and straighten. Kumi bit her lip to hide a smile of pride.

“Fully articulated," he murmured, almost to himself. Then, "Were you going to file them, or just polish them with an abrasive cloth?”

“Just polish them,” she said. “Unless there’s a really rough part – I tried to be pretty careful when I cut them, though.”

“You were. Hang on a minute, there,” he said, as she turned to begin on another claw. “Let me find some earplugs before you get to work, yeah?”

He opened a storage cabinet and pulled out a plastic canister full of bright green ear plugs. Giving her a thumbs-up when he had fitted a pair to his satisfaction, he went in search of a fine polishing cloth. Then he sank into a task chair, closed his eyes, and began to polish the tiny joints by touch. The tightness around his eyes faded as he worked, and his shoulders drooped in relief. Kumi stole an occasional glance at him, a little unnerved by the hard-bitten shinobi’s subdued manner. He must really feel dreadful, she thought, even more grateful for his offering to supervise her in shop.

They worked silently for another half-hour, while Kumi finished up the last few ungues. Palming her prizes, she turned off the lathe and stretched.

Despite the earplugs, Kankurō heard the lathe shut down and opened his eyes to look at her. He put down the polishing cloth and made to rise, but his knees buckled, and he grabbed at the table for support. Even from across the room, Kumi could see that his arm shook with the effort. Alarm flashed across his face as he abruptly sat back down, but anger instantly displaced his distress. He cursed under his breath.

Kumi hid a frown. Male egos were the worst.

She lifted her brows, trying to look curious, but unconcerned. It wasn't easy.

"I skipped dinner, yeah?" the puppet master explained shortly. "Low blood sugar."

Lying? Maybe not. “Oh. Did you say you were going home, Kankurō-dono?” she asked, her tone carefully neutral.

He gave her a sour look, and, sweeping both the polished and unpolished ungues from the table into his hand, thrust them toward her.

“That was the plan,” he acknowledged, as she retrieved her parts. He raised his hands to his head. “I think I might just head back to the office for a while, though. Goddamn, this headache!”

Eying him from beneath her lashes, she asked, “May I walk with you, then? Genin aren’t supposed to be in the theatre after nine without prior consent.”

This was true, but normally the shop tech would have given her a pass. She declined to mention this to the suffering puppeteer. She might see him safely to his office if he thought he was doing her a favor; he would certainly reject an offer of assistance out of hand.

He scowled a little, but made an acquiescent gesture, before rising slowly to his feet.

Gathering her things, Kumi followed him out, turning off the lights and locking the machine shop as she went.

Walking was a struggle for the grim-faced shinobi. She kept a step or two behind him and looked at her phone, striving for nonchalance. Weakness, either in body or character, was akin to mortal sin among the shinobi of Suna, and most especially Corpsmen. A newer, kinder Kazekage had softened the edges of Kumi’s generation, much to the disgust of her grandfather and his ilk, but he had not, apparently, made much of a dent in his brother’s machismo. The puppet master might accept help in a dire emergency – but he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask for it. So Kumi stayed close, silent and surreptitiously watchful, hoping no dire emergencies were forthcoming.

When they finally made it to his office, his hands were shaking so badly he could scarcely fit the key to lock. He muttered a curse when he finally managed to open the door.

“You’re…” He closed his eyes in pain and tried again. “You’re on your own from here, kid. If you get any trouble, tell ‘em to take it up with me. Tomorrow,” he amended with a grimace.

“I will – thank you, Kankurō-dono. Goodnight.” She bowed, and he flicked a hand at her in farewell. Shifting Naruki’s comfortable weight over on her shoulder, Kumi started for home.

When she tried to leave the theatre, though, the gate that let out nearest the barracks had been locked. She would have to backtrack to the central entrance. That would have been annoying by itself, but upon finding herself locked in, she remembered that she still had Kankurō’s key to the machine shop.

“Ah, dammit!” She dug in her pocket for the key and ran back toward the main block, where his office was located. When there was no answer to her knock, she tried the door, relieved to find he hadn’t locked it.

Once the door was open, though, she could hear the puppet master retching in the darkness.

 _Leave_.

Kumi chewed her lip, anxious. He sounded like he meant to hack up his toenails.

_Get out. He doesn’t need help, he doesn’t want help, and you’re just going to annoy him._

She should go. Nothing good could come of her violating his privacy. She should walk away and pretend she hadn’t heard anything. He certainly hadn’t heard her over the racket he was making. She should go.

“Oh, hell,” she muttered.

Kumi set Naruki down by the door, placed the key on Kankurō’s desk, and went into the private bathroom at one end of his office. Crouched over the commode, holding his head in his hand, Kankurō gestured violently at her, unable to stop vomiting long enough to speak. She ignored him and opened the cabinet beneath the vanity. Finding a half-empty bottle of mouthwash, she set it out on the counter. There was also a stack of neatly folded wash cloths, so she took one and dampened it in the sink.

“Nosy… little... bitch,” he gasped. He retched some more.

“You may the best puppeteer in Suna,” Kumi replied coolly, “but Ajibana-sensei has taken first prize for Excellence in Swearing three years running.” She wrung the wash cloth. “You’ll have to do better than that if you mean to scare me away.”

He wasn’t bringing anything up anymore, she noted, only dry heaving. He cursed at her again, more eloquently, when he had breath enough.

“Oh, that’s better.” She pitched her voice low to avoid aggravating his sensitive ears. “And maybe I am,” she conceded as she handed him the cloth.

“Unfortunately, I’m also the sort of idiot who tries to do the right thing, even when I know it will go badly for me. Not that I’m _exactly_ sure what the right thing to do here is,” she admitted, tapping a thoughtful finger on her cheek, “but leaving would be wrong, I know that.

“I could send for an ambulance –” He waved the suggestion away with vehemence, “or I could try to get ahold of the Kazekage –” he started even more frantically at that.

Kumi shrugged.

“Well then, I’m stuck here, being a decent human being, until I’m sure you aren’t going to keel over dead in the night. And you’re stuck here with me, Kankurō-dono. I’m sorry,” she added sincerely, “I wish I hadn’t remembered that I still had your key. But I did, and here we are.”

“I am not,” he wheezed, “going to die, you little smart ass.” He panted quietly in the dark, seemingly finished.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

She handed him the damp rag, and he mopped his face with it. Even so, the oil-based paint was barely smudged. Biting her lip, knowing she was way out of line but too concerned to kowtow to protocol, she reached over and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead, which was clammy and cool.

Surprising; she had expected him to be feverish.

He jerked away from her with another oath.

“D’you have any medicine?” she asked, ignoring his sputtering outrage. “I’ve got a general analgesic in my bag, but nothing for nausea.”

He growled – literally growled, “Desk drawer. Right side.”

Kumi handed him the mouthwash and went in search of something to settle his stomach. There were two sliding drawers in the desk, and one hinged cabinet below.

It did briefly cross her mind to open the top drawer, but she never kept anything there but pens and rulers, the things she used every day. So, she tried the middle drawer, assuming – correctly, as it happened – that miscellanies would have been deposited there.

Kankurō spit out the mouthwash and yelled, “Wait, Kumi – wait!”

But she had already seen the tubes and the pile of needles, packaged in their sterile white paper.

He stumbled to the doorway of the bathroom and stared at her, furious and fuming.

_One two three four breathe one two three four breathe one two three four breathe one two three…_

He must have been doing the same breathing exercise she was, because he blew out a long breath and sank against the doorframe, spent. "Well, shit," he rasped.

"These are IV needles and lines." Kumi struggled to keep an even tone. There was something very seriously wrong, and the seed of fear which had sprouted in the shop suddenly burst into full bloom. "I don't see any caths, though."

_This is not happening. Can't be happening. Why am I here?_

Kankurō closed his eyes, sagging even more limply against the post. "I have a port," he said, a ragged, bitter edge in his voice. "God _damn_ it."

"Do you need an IV drip, Kankurō-dono?" Her own voice sounded very far away, but it was cool and collected, and she pushed her panic further down. A patient, she told herself sternly. Right now, he wasn’t a member of the tiny-but-formidable Kazekage clan, he wasn’t a master puppeteer, he wasn’t someone whose goodwill could help advance her career. He was just an ill patient.

"Probably. Yes." He glowered at her.

Kumi carefully withdrew a line and a hypodermic needle, along with the pills.

"Is there a pump here? Or -"

"Gravity drip."

"Okay. Bags are...?"

"In the cabinet under that drawer." His lips pressed together in pain as she dropped to her knees and opened the cabinet.

"Green tape or blue?"

"Gr... no. The blue."

The bags marked in green tape were filled with a familiar electrolyte solution; she'd seen that frequently in medical training, dehydration being as common as it was. The blue was for parenteral nutrition.

Kankurō hadn't skipped dinner, she realized, with a sick feeling in her own empty stomach. He hadn’t been able to eat.

She laid the bag on the desk, and it sloshed unpleasantly, as unsteady as her self-control. Then she walked toward the puppet master and very firmly placed his arm over her shoulder.

He jerked away, but she had expected that and held tightly to his wrist.

"You can barely stand, Kankurō-dono," she said quietly. "If you fall, or pass out, I'll have to call for help. I’d rather not do that against your wishes, but I'm not strong enough to pick you up, and I’m telling you now that I won't leave you on the floor. Please don't put me in that position."

Humiliated, but unable to argue, he let her help him to the striped sofa. Sitting was a relief; his muscles all but collapsed, leaving him limp and lifeless, sunk into the blue cushions. Wordlessly, she went back to the desk and prepped the IV. At the back of his chair, he had screwed an unobtrusive little hook into the wood; she fixed the bag to it and dragged it over to the sofa. When she handed him the needle, he took it without looking at her, and she withdrew, making some pretense of retrieving the antiemetic – which was, ironically, in the top drawer – so that he could fit the needle to his port without an audience.

He managed that with several curses and despite shaking hands, but by the time she’d found a dosing cup for the syrup, Kankurō had fallen unconscious, still upright and slumped into the sofa cushions. She tapped his shoulder, gently, but he didn’t stir. A harder shake also failed to rouse him.

She wasn’t going to be spending her night piecing her Boom Bugs, clearly. And she was going to miss curfew. Again.

A textbook parenteral feeding could last five to seven hours. She thought she'd been conservative with the drip rate, but having little prior experience, she had no idea how long it might really take. If the damn thing ran dry before he woke, it could potentially introduce air into his bloodstream. So, she was stuck here, until he woke or the IV drained.

Kumi bit her lip in consternation. Eying his long frame dubiously, she tried one last time to wake him. Slouched as he was, he would wake up with a backache to rival his migraine. She couldn’t leave him like that. Could she?

No. She wouldn’t leave any other patient in such an uncomfortable position. Sighing, she doublechecked the slack in the line, which disappeared into the collar of Kankurō’s shirt. Setting a pillow on one end of the sofa, Kumi thanked her stars that he had fallen into the middle seat. She only had to tip him over and put his feet up – and hope he didn’t wake up in the middle of such machinations.

Moving to stand between him and the coffee table, she hesitated, screwing up her courage. Well. In for a penny; he was already good and pissed at her. Supporting his head with one hand, she gently pulled him forward, just enough to free him from the spongy cushions, and grasped his upper arm to steady him as he toppled slowly over.

His head hit the pillow, guided by Kumi’s hand. Still he didn’t wake.

Blowing out a sigh of relief, she lifted his legs so that he lay somewhat awkwardly on his side. Not the most natural position, perhaps, but a decided improvement.

Kumi sat cross-legged on the coffee table, fuming. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? Brought the key back tomorrow. Walked away before he realized she was there. Left when he told her to.

No, she had to go and totally humiliate the one person who loved puppetry as much as she did.

What really burned was that she’d done nothing wrong. What the hell would have happened if she hadn’t been there?

Well, she considered grudgingly, staring at the unconscious man, he might have gotten home before the migraine knocked him out, for one. But he had made that decision, and although it had been thoughtful of him, it was pretty dumb in hindsight. This clearly wasn’t a new thing. He must have known what lay in store for him, and still he’d opted to hang around, for her sake.

She frowned. Had he known? Surely, he wasn’t in the habit of starting a parenteral feeding and then passing out? Maybe a losing consciousness during this kind of attack _was_ a new thing. That was a scary thought. Perhaps she ought to call for a medic, after all.

She pressed thoughtful fingers to his wrist and was pleased to find that his pulse thumped steadily against her fingertips. No cause for alarm there. And he wasn’t in any sort of respiratory distress. Okay, so a call to emergency services was probably premature. Still, she couldn’t leave him alone. If the bag ran dry before he woke – cripes, she’d have to withdraw the needle from his port herself. Ugh. And then… Hell, what then? If he failed to regain consciousness in five to seven hours, she really should have him taken to the hospital and placed in observation.

Although the very mention of an ambulance had horrified him.

Sighing, Kumi glanced around the room. She had her phone, and her Spyders were in her pocket. Maybe should could come up with some kind of rudimentary program to track his vitals. She opened the recording software on her phone and began to tinker with it, hoping she might avoid dragging anyone else into something Kankurō clearly felt ought to be private.

It took her most of the next eight hours to figure out how to accomplish what she meant to do, but by the time the IV fluid had nearly drained, she’d finagled a way to monitor the insensate puppet master without having to stay in the room with him. And a good thing she had, because he was still out cold.

He had roused himself several times, shifting position once or twice and eyeing Kumi blearily from time to time. He even cursed at her once, slurring his words badly. He slipped back into unconsciousness almost immediately, but he wasn’t comatose. Only, apparently, in a great deal of pain. It troubled her not to give him any kind of analgesic, but gods knew sort of drugs he might have already taken.

When the bag had nearly drained, Kumi shook him lightly to wake him, but he didn’t stir.

Kankurō’s port was in his chest. For a temporary situation – and she desperately hoped it was temporary – a peripheral port would have made more appropriate. But for a puppeteer, the muscles of the arm were immaculately tuned instruments. She would have refused a peripheral port absolutely; she had no doubt he would have as well. That made perfect sense.

But still, it was in his _chest_. Under his _clothes_.

There was only a tiny amount of liquid left in the bag as she tried to rouse him one final time, in hopes that she wouldn’t be obliged to remove the needle. His eyelids fluttered, but despite more vigorous attempts to wake him, he made no other signs of consciousness.

Resigned, Kumi rubbed carefully at his shirt, where she thought the port might be. She felt… oogie. There wasn't any better word to describe the creepy-crawly way she felt searching a very private, very proud man's inert body for a handicap he obviously detested.

She found it easily, though, as a small bump over the left side of his chest. She was thankful that the soft black cotton of his shirt had enough give that she could pull his collar down, as opposed to reaching up his shirt. A deft tug had the needle freed, and then she pulled his collar back up with a sigh of relief.

Before she left, she checked the position of her Spyders one last time. Echo perched on the sofa near Kankurō’s head, where she would be clearly visible, and where Kumi could easily pick up the sound of his breathing. Effigy had climbed the wall to perch in a corner, angling her tiny camera toward the couch.

Kumi dashed off a note and slipped it beneath Echo. On the coffee table, she left a glass of water, the antiemetic syrup, and the painkiller from her med kit, in case he wanted it. Then she slipped out through his window, unwilling to face anyone she might run into in the theatre. She'd done the right thing, she told herself, but she felt guilty as hell.


	6. Of All the llls a Man May Own

When Kankurō finally woke, he found himself face-to-face with a desert jumping spider of indeterminate hue, its wiry hairs liberally speckled with tan, grey, and black. Black bands encircled its thick legs, which it held closely its abdomen, and its eight eyes encircled its head in a crown of miniscule black pearls. Two bulging pedipalps of opalescent green gleamed at him. Though he was not, as a rule, nervous around multi-legged critters, neither was he accustomed to finding them ten centimeters in front of his nose. He bolted upright.

Immediately he wished he hadn’t. The agonizing pain that had beaten him unconscious had dissipated, but a bone-deep fatigue had settled in its wake, leaving him heavy-limbed and disoriented. He glanced back at the spider and was surprised to find it sitting serenely on a sheet of notebook paper, evidently unperturbed by his sudden movement. A hasty scrawl covered the paper on which the spider hunched – and the spider, he realized with astonishment, was a tiny and frighteningly realistic puppet.

It was a perfect replica of a species common in Suna, not especially venomous but possessing a startling speed. They could and did occasionally bite, leaving a nasty, itchy welt, though on the whole they tended to be fearful of humans. Kankuro wanted to rip it apart. Miniature puppets could be wickedly difficult to control, and he very much wanted to see what lay beneath the camouflaging hairs. He settled for lying back down and viewing it up close, too weary to move more than was absolutely necessary. Even knowing it was a construct, he couldn’t tell the thing wasn’t a genuine spider.

He recalled the scorpion legs Kumi had been fashioning in the machine shop, also absurdly tiny and utterly beautiful. Half-expecting the damned thing to bite him, he reached for the puppet and removed the paper from beneath it.

_Good morning,_

_Hope you’re feeling better. This is probably as awkward for me as it is for you, and I’m sorry for that, but I couldn’t wake you up after you passed out. You weren’t totally unconscious, but you were not aware enough to remove the IV when it ran low. I stuck around to do that and took off at about three o’clock this morning._

Shit!

His hand went instantly to his chest, but, as the note explained, there was no IV. He had forgotten it entirely. The bag was designed to protect against such negligence, being totally collapsible, but like most fail-safes, it wasn’t a substitute for plain common sense.

His stomach clenched – it was almost six, now. Fuck-it-all. He had been such an ass to her, too. Inhaling sharply, shocked at his own carelessness, he read on.

_I figure you have a place for needles somewhere, but I didn’t want to go looking through your things any more than I had to, so I put the used needle in a piece of gauze and put it on the top shelf of your bookcase._

_I hope Echo didn’t startle you. She and Effigy – she’s on your bookshelf – have been monitoring your breathing since I left, since you didn’t want a medic and I thought leaving you alone was a bad idea._

_I’m not sure what a normal migraine looks like for you, but I’m going to assume you’ll be pretty dead to the world until late this morning, at least. Please text me when you wake up, so that I can cut the feed. (Obviously if I happen to see you wake up, I’ll cut it immediately, but I might be asleep myself by then.)_

_I’m really sorry for the intrusion. I know you didn’t want me here. But I couldn’t just walk away._

He glanced up and sure enough, pearly eyes and green pedipalps on the top of his bookcase caught his eyes. Echo and Effigy – he snorted. A microphone and a camera, that’s what these two were. Surveillance units, probably remotely controlled, when necessary. Just like Little Bird. Well, that explained the realism. No one in Kaze no Kuni would think twice about spotting one of these guys perched on a wall somewhere, particularly out-of-doors. Ingenious.

There was a final line scribbled at the bottom of the paper:

_Of all the ills a man may own, few are more loathsome than indifference._

Kankurō gave spider a wry look. The quote was from an old kabuki play called _Among the Plum Blossoms_ , itself a retelling of an even older fairy tale. In the story, a young princess aids an elderly farmer, who had fallen from a tree while harvesting plums, though all other passersby had ignored him. In the way of fairy tales, the poor old man proves to be a powerful tengu in disguise and promises the little princess that he will one day repay her kindness. Years later, the princess is to be married to a ruthless warlord twice her age, but a horde of karasu tengu descend upon the wedding party. The warlord and all his sons are slain, save the youngest – again, in the way of fairy tales – had fallen in love with the princess the moment he saw her. She marries the youngest son, and together they the plant the plum groves in the southern reaches of Wind, to honor the tengu.

The quote Kumi had referenced was one of the young princess’s lines, rebuking her servants for their unwillingness to help an injured man.

While every instinct balked at the thought of anyone having seen him in such a state, he had to admit that Kumi had been matter-of-fact and efficient about the whole business. A little bossy, perhaps, but helpful, without the false and cloying solicitousness that he dreaded at the hospital. It hadn’t been her fault that he had fallen unconscious while attached to an IV line, forcing her to choose between calling for assistance and staying with him. Any medic would have felt obligated to do that much, even a genin medic-in-training.

Her healing inclinations were odd, now that he had leisure to consider it. Every genin team had a nominal medic, versed in field medicine and first aid, but only those genuinely interested in physicking pursued training beyond that. Few puppeteers doubled as physicians, Lady Chiyo being one notable exception. Although they possessed the fine chakra control and steady hands the profession required, they were also distance fighters, who almost invariably required two hands to operate their puppets, and so were better suited to providing cover for close range comrades. Kumi had been entirely comfortable with the IV, though, and apparently inured to vomit, suggesting she had been training at the hospital.

Nozara Kumi was no more a rank-and-file puppeteer than Sasori or Chiyo had been as genin, already exploring new uses for her puppets, new ways of manipulating them, and studying medicine besides.

Exhausted, embarrassed, troubled by the unsatisfied question of Kumi’s paternity, and anxious about his impending confrontation with his siblings, still Kankurō wanted nothing so much as to talk with the level-headed little girl. Simply to talk to her, to pick her brain and help her refine her ideas. It no longer mattered what lay in the portfolio on his desk, or how she handled her combat puppet, though he itched to see both. Whether or not he had played any part in her genetics, he was resolved to mentor her.

He reached for his phone. It felt as if he were swimming through mud, his weary limbs moved so reluctantly, but while he admired Kumi’s clever little contraptions, he preferred not to the be the object of their scrutiny any longer than necessary.

_I’m awake._

He sent the text without qualification. Neither contrition nor gratitude came naturally, so he didn’t bother trying to compose either an adequate apology or thank you. He would finagle some other means of showing his appreciation.

Kankurō put his phone down and scowled at it. His body felt as if someone had covered him in a lead blanket, while his mind raced, unhindered by its usual restraints of logical progressions and feasibility. He wasn’t overly worried about making things right by Kumi; if “I’m sorry” didn’t exactly roll off his tongue, still he was a pretty good gift-giver, and kids were easy to please. But he still lacked a practicable plan which might lay to rest his doubts regarding that single spring night with her mother, and he hadn’t decided what he was going to say to Gaara and Temari. Neither were dilemmas on which he wanted to stew just now.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, feeling oddly petulant and irritated with himself because of it. It was unlike him to put off unpleasant tasks, to shy away from conflict. Corpsmen met challenges head on; it was a principle he lived by, one of the absolutes that defined him, as a shinobi, as a man. But he couldn’t seem to… he wasn’t… he just didn’t…

He didn’t _feel_ well.

That was it. It was so small, and so stupid, and it annoyed the hell out of him, but there it was. He didn’t feel well. The recurrent migraines and never-ending bouts of nausea sapped him dry. He had enough stamina to cope with them and manage a day-to-day existence, but precious little more. Political shenanigans and family drama demanded a greater share of his personal resources than he could allocate to them.

He exhaled slowly, his mind grinding to a halt in a moment of clarity. He was not a child, to be intimidated by his siblings, by Kumi and her undeclared father, or by the Daimyo and his fossilized, Otsutsuki-altered assassin. He was shinobi, and the only challenge he faced was the only one worth confronting.

Pain didn’t frighten him. He could soldier through that, given purpose enough. Infirmity, on the other hand, terrified him. Crippling injuries, debilitating diseases, irreversible mental trauma – aside from the loss of his loved ones, such weaknesses constituted his greatest fears. While Gaara and Temari remained unaware of his illness, he had also been able to ignore it, pretending he did not need the infusions under his desk, disregarding his faintness and going for twenty-four hours or longer without food or even the desire for it, carrying on as if nothing were wrong. And his folly had come home to roost.

His mind and spirit at last rebelled with anxiety and vacillation, beleaguered by a neglected sickness of the body. The personal agency he so feared losing was already slipping away, lost not to physical frailty, but to denialism and indecisive dithering. The capacity to act meant nothing without the will to do so.

To hell with that.

He would talk to Gaara and Temari tonight and lay the whole fucking thing on the table.

Kumi – well, he didn’t know how best to untangle that knot, yet, but he could start by making amends for his atrocious behavior the night before.

Terashima could go hang until he had his personal issues sorted. Gaara’s instincts were good, and there were two or three Command adjutants politically savvy enough to weasel out the energetic young Daimyo’s intentions. Kankurō would handpick his brother’s security team and his aides before the Kazekage’s mission to Shiroiya.

He would overcome himself. And then he was going to have to face the fact that he was very ill. And getting worse.

 

 

Unpleasant epiphanies failed to keep the Puppet Master awake for long. The post-migraine fatigue overpowered him, and he slept for several hours. After performing what ablutions were possible in the small bathroom attached to his office, he stopped by the Theatre’s administration office to pick up a printed apprenticeship contract. This was a generic document, covering only the most basic terms as delineated by the Theatre proper, but any addenda specific to a given master and apprentice could be handwritten and attached, given that they were initialed and signed by both parties. One item in particular occupied his thoughts as he made his way home to bathe and to change clothes.

All shinobi were required to pass a routine physical to graduate from Academy and again to be promoted to chuunin. It was not generally prerequisite to an apprenticeship, but it shouldn’t raise any flags, either.

He had no doubts at all that the talented genin would jump at the chance to study under him. An extra check-up was barely worth her notice, but once she agreed to it, he could put to bed the question plaguing his mind, because during the exam, she would have blood drawn for routine bloodwork. Mostly routine. If Kawamura would agree to it.

He managed to get himself home and cleaned up, and by ten o’clock he had sketched out a rough plan for the day. Marginally enlivened by a scalding shower, he left home with a bare head and no paint, attracting curious looks as he passed through the village. Sans hood, with his unruly spikes, he strongly resembled the Fourth, which accounted for the staring, though it was the paint’s absence he felt most. Having finally admitted to himself that he was unfit for active service, painting his face seemed a fool’s braggadocio, an empty roar for a paper tiger. But he felt naked without it.

He came to the hospital, a squat, utilitarian building behind Command. It smelled of antiseptic and bleach and cheap air freshener, a mélange of odors capable of turning the Puppet Master’s stomach even when he was perfectly healthy. At the front desk, he asked for Senior Medic Kawamura.

Kawamura was young for such responsibility, no older than Kankurō himself, though her late husband had been some fifteen years their senior. Like Kankurō, Kawamura Sato had been a Corpsman to his bones. His widow was a soft-spoken, attractive woman with sweetly doleful brown eyes and a willowy figure. As was so often the case among nin, however, appearances were deceiving. She had loved and married a puppeteer, and was therefore nigh impossible to intimidate, offend, or put off.

In other words, she was inescapable. Her caseload included Kankurō himself, along with a number of other hard-bitten Corps veterans.

Kawamura had been with another patient when Kankurō arrived, so he paced a restless half an hour before a nurse finally ushered him into her office.

She received him with a skeptical brow. “The situation must be dire for you to have come to me voluntarily. Shall I scrub up and prep an OR?”

He frowned at her, and she smiled innocently back at him. “No? Well, then. What can I do for you?”

“Can we speak privately?”

The humor faded, and she nodded, motioning for him to close the door. He glanced around her office as she took the seat behind her desk. It was a cheery room, overflowing with pictures of her son, who sported some manner of bandage in nearly every image. A large photograph of her stern-mouthed, deceased husband sat in a corner with an incense stick smoking before it, filling the room with a thick fragrance that overpowered the ubiquitous hospital odor. She propped her chin on her laced fingers as he sat down across from her and explained what he wanted.

When he had finished, Kawamura sat back and regarded him thoughtfully.

“Does the Council know about this? Or your brother?”

“No. I only…” He shook his head. “I only became suspicious myself yesterday.”

“Hmm.”

The doctor rotated her chair away from him and considered silently for several minutes.

“What you’re asking isn’t technically illegal, Kankurō,” she said, spinning back to face him, “but it’s questionable, ethically. She is an underage ward of the Village, and while it’s true that senior staff in the hospital have the authority to make medically necessary decisions for her, conducting such a test without her knowledge or consent would –”

“I know all that,” he answered, bluntly. “What I’m asking is whether you’ll do it.”

The medic’s doe-brown eyes searched his for a moment, before sliding toward one of the photos of her accident-prone son. Bending, she rummaged in her desk and withdrew a small photo album. Flipping to the last photograph, she turned the book toward him. A dozen students, including Nozara Kumi, crowded around her in a small exam room, grinning ear-to-ear.

“My latest class,” she explained briefly. “Kumi-chan shows some aptitude, particularly with pharmacology and healing fuinjutsus. Surgery and diagnostics will be more difficult for her. She does best with concrete situations, with results she can predict mathematically. But no two bodies are the same, after all, and it invariably throws her that not everyone’s insides are arranged in quite the same way, and that reactions to identical stimuli can be incalculably and inexplicably diverse. She’s an engineer at heart. Like someone else I know.”

She nodded, slowly, almost to herself.

“Yes,” she said. “I will perform Kumi’s physical exam and, in addition to the standard tests, I will compare her genetic markers to yours.”

She held up two fingers. “On two conditions.”

The first condition was easily conceded. Kawamura asked only that Kumi be informed if the paternity test confirmed her to be Kankurō’s biological daughter. He’d intended as much and told her so sharply, indignant that she thought he might shirk his responsibility.

He argued in vain against the second condition, and so he ended up on Kawamura’s exam table himself.

“Would you relax?” Kawamura put her hands on her hips, exasperated. “It’s awfully hard to concentrate with you scowling up at me like a demon. It was bad enough with the paint; without it you look positively psychotic.”

“You said I had to let you examine me,” he said in a low growl, flat on his back and not liking it one bit. “You didn’t say I had to be pleasant about it.”

She gave him a severe frown, but let it pass. Raising her hands, she rested her cold fingertips lightly against his forehead. A pale green glow suffused them. Kawamura closed her eyes, sinking her sensory chakra into his skull, searching for the injury or illness that had so long escaped her. Her fingers traveled slowly over the dome of his head. Beneath them, his scalp twitched unpleasantly, as if squirming away from her penetrating chakra, and below it, although he knew perfectly well he couldn’t feel a thing, his brain seemed to tingle with an unsettling and unassuageable itch.

“Damn,” she muttered after a minute.

“Still nothing, huh.”

“Had a migraine recently, did you?” she asked, instead of answering.

“Last night.”

Nodding absently, she moved around the table to stand at his side. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she tugged on the cord that bound his haori to reveal the mesh shirt beneath.

“Hey now,” he murmured, grinning suddenly. “No getting frisky.”

“Frisky, my aunt’s right eye,” she retorted. “You couldn’t keep up with me in this state. You’ve lost another two and a half kilos since I last saw you. Nothing here but skin and bones.” She jabbed a hand into his belly, searching out his liver. Satisfied, she moved on to the rest of his abdomen, kneading it under her chilly hands.

“What have you eaten today?”

He didn’t answer, and she heaved a long-suffering sigh.

“And yesterday?” she asked.

As she alternately quizzed and scolded him, her cool, nimble fingers continued to roam over his torso, lying flat to sense his heart and follow his breath into his lungs, probing curiously if Kankurō tensed under her touch.

“Your digestive system is a disaster, I’ll have you know,” she said, gouging at a particularly tender spot with a thumb. Kankurō endured it manfully for a long moment, but when he reached up to stop her, she batted his hand away as if swatting a fly.

“Nothing pathological, that I can tell, but you are supposed to run a meal through it periodically. A pastry and a few bites of donburi aren’t going to cut it. Have you even used the supplements I gave you?”

“Once,” he admitted sheepishly. “Last night was the first time.”

The doctor said something very unprofessional. “Twice a week, Kankurō – I mean it. I allowed the damn port because you promised you could handle it. But you lose another gram and I will absolutely strap you to a table and shove a feeding tube down your nose – don’t you roll your eyes at me, buddy,” she snapped. “You aren’t the only one who takes their responsibilities seriously. I should have had you admitted already.”

He relented slightly in the face of her ire. “Give me a break, Mirei,” he said, but tried to sound apologetic. “I’ve had a hell of a week – and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Kawamura – Mirei was her given name, and though she had told him to use it, he rarely did – softened a bit when he told her he meant to come clean with the Kazekage. Then her nose wrinkled.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but Lady Temari isn’t likely to take it well,” she ventured, lips pursed. “Could you possibly wait until she returns to Konoha?”

“No. I managed to get myself backed into a corner.” He grimaced. “It’s got to be tonight.”

Kawamura shook her head.

“That was clumsy of you. She’s likely to destroy a good portion of the Village before she calms down.” She huffed, discontent. “Now, listen. I’m going to order some bloodwork, since I’m taking a sample from you anyway, but I don’t think it’s going to show anything we haven’t seen before.”

She seated herself on edge of the table as he sat up and retied his belt.

“No sign of infection. No masses of any kind. No bleeding. No pressure on the brain. I did notice low serotonin, which is why I asked if you’d had a migraine recently, but that’s not unusual.”

“So, nothing new.” He slid off the table. “Surprise, surprise.”

“Not that I can see. But have you given any more thought to seeing a civilian neurologist?”

He scoffed.

“I know it’s unorthodox,” she said gently. “We like to hold our secrets close. But shinobi medics are all experts in trauma, wound care, and physical therapy. We have to be. Civilian physicians have the option of focusing their studies more broadly or narrowly, depending on their interests. A specialist may well be able to diagnose something we would miss.

“Kankurō – I just don’t think we can afford to keep missing with you.” Her eyes grew sympathetic. “I’ve let this go on far too long, you know.”

He clenched his jaw and nodded. “It’s official, then?”

“I’m afraid so. I wanted to wait until you were ready to discuss it with the Kazekage, and…” She shrugged. “Now that you are, it’s time. You may continue your duties in the Theatre – although I’d prefer it if you’d cut back your hours – but you may consider yourself off-roster for the foreseeable future.”

* * *

 

 

After that depressing encounter, he headed to the market square. His errand there took longer than he expected, as one of the items he wanted proved elusive, but once he had his purchases wrapped, he forced down a bento he didn’t want and went on to the barracks, with the little genin’s folio of schematics in hand.

For the second day in a row, Kumi was out, not responding to her texts, and the admin had no clue where she might be. Kankuro had just sucked in a breath to curse at the careless woman behind the desk, when a child’s voice piped behind him, “You said you was looking for Kumi-chan?”

A tall boy with messy hair and a scar across his jawline had emerged from the genin wing of the barracks and was eying him with blatant interest.

The puppet master nodded. “I’m not having much luck,” he admitted. “You are…?”

“Hayashi Seichi. The best third of Team Ajibana,” he answered, with a mocking little bow.   

Kankurō raised his brow, but, impatient, he let the insolence pass. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you, Hayashi-kun?”

“Well…” he drawled, “yeah.  But see, thing is, she ain’t  _s’posed_  to be where she’s at.  And if you show up looking for her, she’ll know it was me ratted her out.”

“Alright,” he replied, intrigued. Somewhere off-limits – she didn’t seem the sort.  “I’ll bite.  What can we do about that?”

“I could maybe go and get her for you.” Seichi smirked, narrowing his sharp, dark eyes. “For a price.”

Kankurō smirked right back. “Or, you could tell me where she is,” he suggested, “and I could maybe _not_  ask my brother to make sure you get the crummiest D ranks available.”

The kid sighed and crossed his arms behind his head. “It was worth a shot,” he said, unconcerned. “Kumi-chan is probably in the old theatre.”

“The theatre! That place is –”

“Falling apart. Yeah, I know. She got stuck there once for two days, after a wall collapsed and blocked her in. No one woulda known what happened, exceptin’ I got worried and went looking for her.”

 The old performance theatre had been totally abandoned for more than a decade, having been rendered structurally unstable after a monstrous sandstorm. Tearing it down was one of many items on Gaara’s never-ending to-do list. Kankurō’s stomach clenched with a sudden and startling fear. _No one would have known._

“I’m surprised she had the nerve to go back,” he said, as evenly as he could manage. “Why is she there, kid? Answer me quick,” he added.

“Well, it ain’t a quick story, but if I’m gonna tell you, I figure I owe it to Kumi-chan to tell you the whole thing. You’re a puppeteer, too, so maybe you won’t get her in too much trouble.”  Seichi leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms.

“Okay, so, a few years ago, see, Kumi-chan comes back to her room and Naruki – that’s her combat puppet, right? Naruki is in pieces, totally disassembled.  Her face is broke in two and some of her parts are gone.  That was the worst of it, but also Kumi’s sketchbooks was ripped up, one of her prototypes was smashed – it was ugly.”  

He frowned, suddenly dead serious. 

“Kumi-chan’s tough, yeah? She got bumped to our year when she was eight, and we didn’t take it so good. Here she was, better, smarter than most of us, and she don’t even look old enough to be in Academy. Still the shortest in our year. But nothin’ got to her, yeah? Not that she’d let you see. She was okay being a loner, so she owned that, made that her thing. Never complained if she got picked on, never went whinin’ to the teachers, never gave a damn about fitting in where she wasn’t wanted. And she never cried, that I saw. Not once in two years. But seeing Naruki like that? That tore her up.” 

He glanced up, realizing he was rambling, but Kankurō waved at him to continue, fascinated. Seichi shrugged and went on. 

“Cuz, see, Kumi-chan’s _mom_ built that puppet for her. Started it the day she was born, like, made the first sketches on freaking hospital memo paper. The Nozara clan took mosta her stuff – clothes, pictures, furniture, all that, when she died, sayin’ Kumi wouldn’t have any place to store it. And the adjudicator let ‘em, cuz they was right. They’s s’posed to give it back when she makes chuunin – but I won’t be holdin’ my breath. Naruki and her mom’s wood carving kit and a coupla pictures are about all Kumi-chan has of her mom’s – and some asshole breaks into her room and mutilates her puppet.”

“Would that have been Nozara Gohachiro?” Kankurō asked, his voice emerging thin and angry. First her puppet and then her hands. A dry ache of fury rose in his throat, and he swallowed it down, taken aback by the intensity of his reaction.

Seichi blinked, surprised, as Kankurō struggled to retain his composure. “Maybe. Son of a bitch was mean enough. She never said, if she knew. Anyways, Kumi-chan moved all her puppetry things outta the dorms after that. Bought herself a padlock and kinda ‘appropriated’ one of the rooms in the old theatre as a workroom.”

Kankurō nodded woodenly, forcing his fists to uncurl.

“Okay.  Which room?”

“West wing’s in the best shape,” Seichi told him, “but since the west door is the most visible, she sneaks in through the east side. If you can get in from the west, you’s just followin’ that main corridor almost to the performance hall,” he gestured with his hands, “and then there’s a hallway to the left with a half-collapsed wall. She climbs over that. Room she uses is a few doors down, on the right.”

Kankurō pulled out his wallet and handed the boy two hundred ryo. “Thanks, kid.”

“I’s jokin’, Kankurō-dono,” Seichi said, accepting the cash. He grinned. “Mostly.”


	7. The Old Theatre

The theatre _was_ falling apart, but it was also quiet and oddly peaceful. It hadn’t taken long for the desert to begin reclaiming the abandoned playhouse; sand and sun swept in through the cracks in the doors and through open windows, leaving the hollowed out building as warm and dusty and bleached as a skeleton in the dunes. Broken shutters swayed in the afternoon breeze, so that sunlight filtered through them, undulating like waves on the fine bits of dust and sand in the air. There was a sadness to it, but the easy sort, the bitter sweetness of remembered beauty, rather than the melancholia of lingering grief.  

Kankurō smiled faintly. The new theatre had been built when he was about eight, but he remembered this one. His earliest drills had been here, his first teachers, his first puppets. Erected in more prosperous day, the old Theatre’s décor far surpassed that of its successor, and even now, the faded medallions of the handwoven carpets called to mind the glamour that had been. 

He had meant to scold Kumi for hiding out in this unstable, potentially dangerous place. But in the hushed warmth, with the ghosts of old artists drifting in and out on the golden, waving light, he was tempted to stake out a room for himself in the silent theatre.

He found the hallway with the half-collapsed wall, and sure enough, a sliver of light shone on the floor through the crack of the third door on the right. He opened the door suddenly, expecting to catch Kumi off-guard.

Instead, he found her fast asleep in a corner of the room, her curly head pillowed on her arms as she slumped over a paint-splattered, makeshift workbench, cleverly fashioned from a pair of theatre doors wrenched from their hinges. The room was warm; she had shed her black jacket and wore only a black tank top, which covered her midriff in breathable mesh. The metallic sheen of a scorpion’s tail peeked out from a loosely clenched fist.

Had she left him at three in the morning and come straight here to finish her scorpion? Must have done. She was wearing the same clothes, and she was tired enough to be sleeping at her table.

So stupid. So alarmingly, familiarly stupid.

After a long moment, he tore his gaze from the sleeping child to survey the workshop she had carved out of the bones of the old theatre.  Kumi had engineered a pretty sweet set-up for herself, if one could ignore the heat and the collapsed ceiling on the far side of the room.  Kankurō couldn’t. Cripes, what if she had been beneath it?  And how secure could the rest of the room possibly be?  He gave the ceiling a wary eye and continued his assessment.

Several moth-eaten velvet ropes hung across the nearest wall, with Kumi’s clumsy, untrained drafts clipped to them like photographs in a darkroom. Sketchbooks in garishly bright colors littered the floor, around a pile of seat cushions cannibalized from the old auditorium. Further on in the dark, painted faces stared at him and spare limbs in various states of refinement posed, frozen until their mistress summoned them, and coils of chakra-activated string had been stashed in the corner.

Above the desk hung a pegboard of salvaged acoustic panels, holstering her large tools on silver hooks and her mid-sized tools in colorful plastic bins.  A larger bin on the floor overflowed with compasses and triangles, protractors, and rulers, and a T-square hung haphazardly over one side. Pens and pencils were crammed by the handfuls in decorative tea tins on the workbench, below a brightly burning, battery-powered work lamp. And in a wooden tray lined with shaped foam, there were a dozen hand chisels for wood carving, each with a decoratively painted wooden handle.

Rira’s tools. One of those few mementos Kumi had been grudgingly permitted to keep.

Another hung by the desk, not a meter from the sleeping genin, where it could be summoned at a moment’s notice.

Naruki.

He had glimpsed the combat puppet the previous night but had been too preoccupied with his migraine to perceive much. Humanoid female, black hair, bright colors. Now, as he approached on silent feet, he could see that her persona was that of a court lady, complete with elegant coiffure, headdress, and junihitoe. As he fingered the cloth, however, he saw that the appearance of the many layers of the heavy courtly kimono had been contrived by simple strips of cloth stitched to the hems of the outer kouchigi, and there were long, largely concealed slits in the fabric, no doubt to release Naruki’s weaponry.

He reached up to touch her painted red lips, careful of disturbing her mistress, noting with interest that the delicate-looking finish was in fact some kind of textured paint over an ordinary wooden head. The face was a solid mask – no openings for weaponry there. The hands were the same, immobile and uselessly pretty. In short, it looked like nothing so much as an actual bunraku puppet, a gorgeously sculpted, porcelain-faced doll.

It was substantially larger than any genuine bunraku puppet would have been. In fact, he realized with a thoughtful frown, crown to foot she was larger than most humanoid-type puppets, towering some sixty centimeters above her tiny mistress. It probably outweighed the little genin by five or ten kilograms. Karasu didn’t weigh half what Kankurō had weighed at twelve, but even so, he’d been a burden, back then. He would have never lugged around something as cumbersome as Naruki – unless it was something truly spectacular.

Despite the heat, Kankurō shivered as a new thought struck him.

Hayashi said Rira began designing Naruki the day Kumi was born. Although she herself had been a puppeteer, the Nozara were not traditionally Corpsmen. The Puppeteer Corps was largely free of familial associations, anyway. Most hailed from families without particular clan jutsus or had spurned their parents’ techniques, as Rira had. As Kankurō had.

The Nozara clan specialized in secret chakra flow techniques which allowed them to create blades of wind with their hands. A few of the elders, with an ancestry linked to the scattered nin of Uzu no Kuni, were fuinjustu experts. So far as Kankurō knew, none of the younger generation had shown any aptitude for it, except perhaps Rira, who had used trapping seals during the War and developed the self-directed chakra-draining seal that allowed Little Bird to fly. Sealing was nearly a lost art. Even so, Rira had rejected a skill which would have made her uniquely valuable to her clan and to her Village, opting to join the Corps, where she served honorably but without distinction.

How had she predicted that Kumi would be a puppeteer? Had she simply anticipated her daughter following in her footsteps, unable to tap the Nozara elders for the techniques that should have been her birthright? Or had she another reason for believing that Kumi must inevitably take up her chakra strings?

If Rira had known that Kumi’s father had created and mastered the Black Secret Technique… hell, what else could she have been?

He stared at the puppet for a long while, dredging up what he could remember of the night he had shared with the woman who built it. Rira had been petite but shapely, built like a dancer with strong legs and a sculpted torso, much more powerful than her small size suggested. She laughed a lot, he recalled – not the giddy, drunken laughter that filled the night air around them, but the rich, self-assured laughter of a woman comfortable in her own body and just as comfortable sharing it. That laughter had teased him across the room and to her side, more intoxicating than the wine. It was difficult to reconcile Nozara Rira’s effortless sensuality with the sleeping, frizzy-haired genin lying beneath her puppet. What had she been like as a mother? Fun-loving? Affectionate? He had enjoyed dancing with her – had she spun her little girl around the house as Kankurō had once spun her around the water gardens?

He finally looked away.

All said, Kumi’s retreat was messy and girly and gritty and it smelled of paint and poison. Stripped of its color, it would have been frighteningly reminiscent of his own dark workspace in the basement of his house, full of models and sketches and spilled varnish and half-formed ideas. Kankurō felt abruptly ashamed for having intruded it in.

Silently, careful not to wake the little girl, he slipped back toward the door. The warmth had grown uncomfortable, and he shrugged off his coat. Leaving the door open to help alleviate the heat, he sat on the ground next to it and soundlessly withdrew the first of Kumi’s sketches from her folio.

He shook his head as he studied it, unsure whether to be amused or alarmed. Like his own, Kumi’s mind did not lend itself to bullet points, but spilled out in one massive scratchpad of ideas. Little notes to herself and the occasional explanation for him scrawled across the paper in deplorable script, jotted down freely as ideas had come to her. He worked in a similar fashion, though he had learned, thankfully, to keep his notes to one side of the page for clarity’s sake.

None of the designs presented anything quite as unprecedented as Little Bird, but he was impressed, regardless. Unbound by tradition, she dreamed up new ways of using her talents, in and out of combat. She had imagined burrowing insects meant to deliver stealthy poison attacks with fast-acting paralytics and large aerial puppets to bombard an enemy from above. She had a rough concept sketched for a puppetry-animated armored ambulance, complete with a humanoid nurse, designed to retrieve downed shinobi from the front lines of a battlefield and provide emergency care while withdrawing. There were many sketches of arachnid-type puppets, and like Little Bird’s “clean” copies – Kankurō snorted – each was precise and beautiful. From a purely artistic standpoint, the plans were a joy to look at. So many points of articulation, so painstakingly reflective of the creature’s true anatomy.

As young and inexperienced as she was, Kumi applied the fundamentals of crafting and puppetry that she did know in tremendously creative ways, building workarounds that allowed her to reproduce motions an older puppeteer would have effected by means of more advanced techniques. And she did know the fundamentals, inside and outside and upside down. Her drafting skills, as he’d seen before, were sadly lacking, despite a fine hand for drawing and a head for mathematics. Lady Chiyo had taught Kankurō draftsmanship, at his father’s request. And now he would teach Kumi.

He was scribbling some notes of his own when a small gasp interrupted his thoughts. He looked up to find the precocious little puppeteer staring at him in dismay, her eyes as round as saucers. Her cheek was flushed where it had been lying on her arms, and there were red streaks against her white face. Kankurō wagged his brows at her.

“This place is dangerous, you know,” he said, casually picking up another sketch. “And seriously out-of-bounds for a genin.”

She swallowed hard and got to her feet, making few tentative steps toward him. “Kankurō-dono, I –”

“I heard the barracks wasn’t particularly safe for your puppets,” he interrupted, as though he hadn’t heard her, “and that’s the only reason I’m not going to report you. But puppets are pretty damn useless if the puppeteer is buried under a half-ton of fallen plaster. Start breaking this place down, kid. I want you out of here by Sunday.”

Her expression grew pained. “I _can’t_!”

“And I’m telling you you’re going to.” Then he relented. “I’ll get you set up somewhere in the Theatre, kid. I know there’s no room in the dorms for the kind of work we do.” Glancing around the room, he added, “It won’t have the character your space here does, but it will be secure, and you won’t have to risk life and limb to use it.”

Her slim shoulders sagged in relief. “And you’re not going to report me?” she asked, clearly less concerned about the possibility of getting in trouble than losing her workshop. He smothered a smile.

“No, but I should. And don’t bother Hayashi-kun about it. I didn’t give him a lot of room to argue with me.” He crooked a finger at her, not bothering to rise from the ground. “Come ‘ere.”

 She obeyed instantly, her bare feet padding across the old wooden floor like a kitten’s. Worry flickered in her eyes as she drew closer, spying his sunken chest under its fitted mesh shirt, but she concealed it quickly, the artful little waif.

Rummaging in his jacket pocket, he palmed Kumi’s spiders and held them up to her. “I thought you might want these back.” She bent to reach for them, but he closed his fingers loosely, caging the twin surveillance units. “You said, quote, ‘I cut my teeth on arachnids.’ Prove it. Show me your string work.”

A smile tugged at her mouth.

“I hope you’re not afraid of spiders, Kankurō-dono,” she warned him, as one of the spiders convulsed in his hand, twitching with a nervous, spastic quickness that was as true-to-life as its crown of pearly eyes or its wiry, multicolored hairs. He only just possessed the wherewithal to avoid flinching when the other spider squirmed out of his loose fist and leapt unexpectedly up his forearm to wave its pedipalps at him before skittering toward his shoulder.

The first spider, less aggressive than its sister puppet, grasped and clung realistically for a moment or two from his fingers before dropping to the ground and scurrying behind Kumi’s feet.

“How do they work? Do you just position them and leave them be, or can you control them remotely, like Little Bird?”

“I can maneuver them remotely, but I don’t like to. These guys may someday be irretrievable, so it’s a bad idea to leave a chakra-draining seal on them, when I can’t be sure I can resume manual control and break the seal, right?”

Kumi lowered her arm, and the little spider on the floor scrambled up her pant leg to nestle in her hand. She flipped it over onto its back and crouched in front of Kankurō, displaying the little camera lens hidden behind its pedipalps.

“Besides, these guys have applications outside puppetry. Someday I’ll configure them to be radio-controlled, so that they – or something similar – can be used from a command center for remote reconnaissance. I’m not up-to-speed on the electronics, though – yet – so it’s a someday-project.”

“You know enough to transmit the video and audio from the spiders to… where?” He frowned, and she dug in her pocket for her cell phone.

Kankurō groaned as she held it up for him. “I _hate_ those things.”

“Really? I wouldn’t know what to do without mine.”

“You should answer it more often.”

She bit her lip to hide a smile. “Yeah… but… anyway,” she said, returning to his original point, “it’s not like I built the mike or the camera from scratch, and I didn’t design the software, either. I _can_ code, a tiny bit, but mostly I just record macros and tweak them.

“Which is not the best way to go about it,” she admitted with a heavy sigh, “but I don’t have the coding skills to do more. Another someday-project.”

Kankurō shook his head in wonder. “Ambitious, aren’t you. Electronic engineering, programming, machining – medicine? When do you expect to have time for missions?”

She laughed, a bit sheepishly. “I know. There’s too much to learn.” She lifted her shoulders, suddenly shy. “I just… I like knowing how things work, yeah? I like _making_ things work.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Focus would come with time, born of necessity. He wasn’t going to be the one to stifle her creative impulses.

“I can help with radio controls,” he offered, “but you’re on your own with the programming. I’m not a fan of computers.” Eying the beady-eyed puppet on his shoulder as it twitched and turned, as if deciding whether to run or attack, he asked, “So this is Echo, huh? If that one,” he nodded at Kumi’s hand, “has the camera.”

“Yup. Effigy is more timid. Echo has to be nearer the action for the microphone to pick up much. I need a more sensitive one, but they’re expensive.”

The fingers of one hand drew inward, and Echo leapt cleanly off Kankurō’s shoulder to land on Kumi’s head before racing down her arm to join Effigy, where both spiders nestled together. They twitched now and again, as if listening.

As Little Bird’s snapping beak and excited hopping had enlivened the bird, so Echo and Effigy’s paroxysmal movements animated their artificial frames with a realism that surpassed technique, capturing the essence of a living animal. Sasori had been able to animate his own artificial body in such a way; Kumi did it as well or better with utterly foreign anatomies. So well, in fact, that it overshadowed the fact that her technique was impeccable, which, he recalled belatedly, was why he had asked her to move them via puppetry in the first place.

“You studied them from life, I suppose.”

He was beginning to understand why her grandfather had wanted her back in the Nozara fold. If she had inherited her mother’s skill with fuinjutsu, the old bastard had all the more reason to hope to claim her.

Raising her twin puppets to better view them, Kumi stroked one, as if it were a pet.

“Some things, I did. Things that may need to hide in plain sight. If they mimic reality closely enough, they don’t register as threats, even if they happen to be noticed. Combat puppets don’t need that kind of pretense, so I don’t bother with it. Naruki isn’t remotely life-like.”

He glanced at the elegantly attired princess on the wall. “She’s beautiful, though.”

Regret darkened the genin’s green eyes. “Mom’s mask was prettier,” she said, with a bitter note in her voice that tugged at Kankurō’s heart. “But I did the best I could.”

She was still crouching; Kankurō leaned forward and tapped the ground before him. “Sit,” he told her. “Hayashi-kun told me a little about that. I guess you still have the broken pieces?”

“Of course.” Lowering her eyes, she admitted, “I made and broke a dozen masks, testing different ways I might repair it. I never did land on a good method.”

He nodded, making a quick mental note for himself; the mask still might be reparable, in the right hands. “Do you know who damaged her in the first place?”

Dropping to the floor, Kumi drew her skinny knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. “My cousin. He’s grown up since then, but he used to be pretty awful. Tearing up Naruki was the worst thing he ever did.”

“Worse than breaking your hands?”

Narrowing her cat’s eyes at him, suddenly wary, she sat upright and looked at him speculatively. “Seichi-kun didn’t tell you about that.”

“No,” he answered easily, “my brother did. So…?”

“So tearing up Naruki was worse than breaking my hands.” Her expression remained carefully neutral.

Kankurō regarded her thoughtfully for a minute. Clearly there was more to the story than what she had told Gaara.

He wasn’t surprised. She was worryingly independent for eleven – almost eleven, he reminded himself, more so than either of his nephews, who were both nearing fourteen. If Shinki, who was himself mature for his age, had returned home to find his puppets destroyed, he wouldn’t have thought to remove them to a secret, out-of-bounds location – he would have reported the crime and let the authorities handle it. Shikadai might be stubborn enough to have performed well under difficult conditions, as Kumi had during her exams, but it never would have occurred to him to do so. He’d never encountered a need for that kind of resolve.

Both were the sorts of things an eleven-year-old Kankurō might have done.

“You seem to think you can trust him,” Kankurō prompted. “Even after all he’s done.”

Kumi blew out a long breath and searched his eyes, considering what to tell him. “I would trust Gohachiro with my life.”

He raised a brow. “The boy who bullied you all through Academy.”

She shrugged. “He did, but by the time I was nine, it was all for show. Naruki was one of the last really nasty things he ever did. We became friends not long after that.”

Kankurō looked at her skeptically.

She gave him a wry smile. “It’s a long story, Kankurō-dono. The short version is that he rescued me from someone who would have done a lot worse than pull my hair or call me names, and after that, we made our peace with each other. Grandfather couldn’t stand it though, so he pretended to antagonize me until he graduated. We had a whole code worked out in insults – ‘You’d better run’ meant ‘go back to the barracks through the marketplace, it’s not safe to take the shortcuts today.’ He wasn’t the only bully in Academy, after all. ‘What’re you looking at?’ meant ‘do you need any money?’” If I answered with another insult, it meant I could use some cash. If I said ‘nothing,’ or ignored him, I was fine.

“There was loose tile,” she recalled, “in the chakra control classroom. He hid all sorts of things there for me. CDs. Snacks. Money.”

Kankurō rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to rebuild the Nozara Gohachiro his imagination had constructed. It wasn’t easy.

“Why bother with the subterfuge? Just because Nobu wouldn’t have liked it?”

Kumi scoffed. “Wouldn’t have liked it? He would have beaten Gohachiro to death if he’d been honest about being friends with me.”

“I know he’s a hard-ass, kid, but I find it hard to believe that he –”

“Gohachiro defended me once,” Kumi interrupted, holding up one finger. “One time. Grandfather Nobu hurt him so badly he didn’t come to classes for two weeks. And he broke three ribs when Gohachiro only stomped on my hands instead of smashing them with a mallet.”

“Fucking bastard.” Kankurō heaved a sigh, filing away this new bit of ugliness.

Gaara said the kid had been roughed up. Kankurō hadn’t forgotten that, but there was a distinct gap between what Gaara thought was acceptable and what many other shinobi considered appropriate forms of corporal punishment, particularly old, traditional clans like the Nozara. Nobu had gone far beyond those standards.

Even so.

“Regardless. He broke your hands, Kumi. He didn’t have the balls to say no.”

She looked away, her face twisting at the painful memory. “He did, Kankurō-dono. When Gohachiro told me what Grandfather Nobu wanted him to do, he was furious; he wasn’t going to do it. I was the one who told him to go through with it. He was crying harder than me when it was done.”

“You – _you_ told him to –” He couldn’t finish the sentence and stared at her in disbelief.

Kumi wrapped her arms around her knees, curled up into a tight little ball. “I saw an opportunity,” she said. “I had to take it.”

“An opportunity.”

“Grandfather Nobu made a mistake.” She shrugged matter-of-factly. “That’s unusual. He’s very careful, the old man, very cautious. But he was angry with me for refusing his offer to join the clan, and he went too far. I had to capitalize on that.

Kankurō rubbed an agitated hand over his mouth and chin. “Explain.”

“Gohachiro obeyed orders, ostensibly, right? As far as the clan knows, he didn’t betray Grandfather Nobu even when the Kazekage questioned him, thanks to Gaara-sama keeping our secret. He took the fall for something he had been ordered to do and proved his loyalty to the clan. But he _also_ refused to permanently damage my hands. And he’s not-so-secretly ‘making things right’ with me.”

Kumi paused. “Do you see? Gohachiro took a stand with the Nozara. By quietly rejecting such heavy-handed tactics, he’s told the whole clan what he thinks of them. And let them know he won’t be used for such dirty tricks again.”

Kankurō nodded grimly. “Okay, it made Gohachiro look good. Potentially divides the clan. That was worth it?”

She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t have made him break my hands, just for that. Although I would like to see him named the next head of the clan. His father – my Uncle Tadanobu – is even worse than our grandfather. It was worth it, because Gohachiro’s sense of honor made Grandfather Nobu look petty and unstable by comparison. It was worth it because it forced even the most loyal clan members to question an order to deliberately maim a genin.”

“I would fucking hope so!”

She bit her lip at his vehemence, and he ground his teeth together, trying to order his thoughts.

“You allowed the attack,” he reasoned through gritted teeth, “to discredit Nobu.”

“I allowed it,” she corrected, “because _by_ discrediting him, I hoped I could prevent him from attacking me again. If Gohachiro had refused to break my hands, he would have ordered someone else to do it, someone who wouldn’t care whether or not they permanently injured me. He’s lost the opportunity – it would be political suicide for him to move against me again.

“Well, at least openly,” she amended, with a furrow between her brows. She shrugged, unwilling to consider what he might do covertly. “I also hoped it would force the clan elders to look at how brutally Grandfather Nobu punishes him. I didn’t expect the Kazekage’s help, there, but now the whole clan knows that he’s watching, and that he won’t tolerate Gohachiro being beaten anymore.”

Kumi stared at her hands for a long moment, her spiders finally stilled. Then she put Echo and Effigy in a pocket. “Our crazy old grandfather has lost considerable standing among the Nozara. And we’re reasonably safe, now, Gohachiro and me. So, yes. That was worth breaking my hands.”

She looked up at him, her little white face earnest and troubled, willing him to understand.

He did. Gods knew it scared him half to death, but he did. Neither he nor Gaara had even considered what might have happened had Gohachiro refused his grandfather’s order. Kumi had not only foreseen it, but had orchestrated a silent, miniature coup, sacrificing her hands to thwart further attacks. Her creativity was not limited to wood and steel, it seemed.

He almost asked why she hadn’t told Gaara the truth. Instead he laughed in awed disbelief.

“If anyone were to realize you and Gohachiro had conspired to undermine Nobu, it would have looked bad for the Kazekage to be involved. So, you told him half the story, keeping your history together secret, and then asked him to back down, to keep him clear of any backlash.”

She flashed a tight smile at him, confirming his conjecture.

“Fuck’s sake, Kumi-chan,” he said quietly, leaning back against the peeling wallpaper.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ Seven hells, kid! I don’t know even where to begin!”

She drew back, and then, realizing he wasn’t angry, ventured a smile. He closed his eyes, thinking. Nobu was a crafty old buzzard and would eventually avenge himself. Kumi had stalled him, perhaps, and she had definitely landed a solid blow to his reputation, but her audacity would only protect her for so long. A close association with the Kazekage clan would serve her in far better stead.

“Alright. Here.”

From the shopping bag he’d brought with him, he withdrew a gift sack printed with festival masks. “I’m not particularly good at thank yous or apologies. So, let’s get those over with, for starters.”

Her cat’s eyes widened as he proffered the gift. “But there’s nothing to –”

“I disagree.” He shook the bag at her, and she took it, dipping her head in a bow.

“Go ahead and open it, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I need to tell you a couple of things before I just hand this over.”

She obeyed, withdrawing a slim, neatly carved wooden case from the giftbag. Flipping open the hinged lid, Kumi revealed five stoppered glass bottles, each containing a different toxin. Before he could stop her, she’d lifted the vial on the far right with a look of awe that preempted the warning he’d meant to give.

“Is this blue scorpion venom?” she asked, wide-eyed. It had a telltale purple tinge, so he was unsurprised she had recognized it.

“I’ve never given toxins as a gift before.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I had a feeling it might go over well with you, though. Are you familiar with any of the others?”

“This one is marrow root…” she said with a frown, glancing at him for confirmation. At his nod, she pointed at another vial. “That’s gemweed… and this one is some kind of venom, I think. This one I haven’t seen before.”

She touched the first bottle.

“I’m glad to have caught you off guard with something. The venom is yellow-banded cobra, by the way. That last is the one I wanted to talk to you about. It’s synthetic, with a stupidly long chemical name that no one would recognize if you happened to remember it. Most of us in the trade call it Trip.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s been used as a truth serum, although it’s not particularly reliable. It leaves its victims extremely susceptible to the power of suggestion, so that genjutsus become much harder to detect or evade.”

Rolling the bottle between her hands, she gave him a speculative look. “Ajibana-sensei is really good with genjutsu.”

“No kidding?” He dropped his jaw in mock surprise before smirking at her. “But what do you expect from someone who relies heavily on genjutsu?”

“Poison, traps, and backup,” she answered, without hesitation. He grinned in approval.

“Exactly. Because poison is frequently the finishing blow to a genjutsu-user’s delay tactics, most opponents will take special care to avoid their weapons. Let your sensei know you have that, and if you get into a tight spot, you can force an enemy to choose between Ajibana’s attacks and yours. Mind the fumes, too, the vapors are hallucinogenic, even at coating strength. Really better to have that already applied – with a mask. Dried on the blade, it remains potent for up to a week.”

He glanced at the toxins. Any venom was relatively easy to use; the most popular combat venoms provoked an immediate or near-immediate response without modification. He had requested the poison master prepare the others at coating strength, a dilution or concentration at which bloodstream contact with a treated weapon produced a standard toxin reaction. She should be pretty familiar with all of them from Academy, excepting Trip.

Still… “You do know marrow root can be absorbed through the skin?” he asked dubiously.

“I remember. Are they all at coating strength?”

“Considering it’s prohibited for a genin to have anything else.”

An innocent – and totally false – smile touched the little girl’s lips, and Kankurō heaved a sigh in aggravation. Of course she was experimenting with mixing her own poisons. He had. Not that _that_ meant anything – half the kids in the Corps did it.

“Don’t play with these, kid. The venoms are deadly as they are. Trip is a bitch to dilute or concentrate, because the fumes are so damned dangerous. The psychoactive effects are bad enough, but it can also be flammable. I told you not to apply it without a mask – even I wouldn’t attempt to alter it outside a fume hood.”

“I understand, but if I use it in my Widows, they don’t deliver enough poison by volume for coating strength to be effective,” she explained rapidly, in reply to his lowered brows. “But if it were a little stronger, then I wouldn’t have to worry about when potency duration, either. It would be stored in their poison bulbs until I needed it.”

“Then use one of the venoms. Do not,” Kankurō repeated, injecting a note of sternness into his voice, “play with the poisons.”

“Do you want to tell me not to run with scissors, too?” Kumi grinned. “Besides, I concentrate gemweed all the time.”

“But if you did it incorrectly, you could…” Kankurō’s voice trailed off, and he gave her hard, level look.

The puppet master had deliberately acquired resistances to many poisons, but he also possessed a natural immunity to a several venoms – mostly anguine – and to certain mycotoxins. Such inherited resistances weren’t rare among Suna nin, but they were particularly strong within the Kazekage clan and among the Igarashi, his mother’s family. All of the Sand Siblings possessed their father’s resistances to viperid venom.

Only Kankurō had inherited their mother’s immunity to several varieties of poison mushrooms. The poison produced by gemweed, a ruby-red, frondlike fungus cultivated in the Suna oases for its quick-acting amatoxins, had no effect at all on him.

“Why gemweed?”

“It’s my favorite,” Kumi answered with a shrug. “Partially because it’s cheap. I can grow it myself and I only need silica gel and ethanol to purify it. But I do have _some_ common sense, Kankurō-dono. I don’t prepare _any_ poison in an unventilated workshop – unless I happen to be immune to it.”

Kankurō swallowed with difficulty, reminding himself to breathe. Well, some small, rational part of his brain observed, he’d know soon enough.

He had to clear his throat but succeeded in keeping his tone even. “You've been tested, huh? Any other resistances?”

“Quite a few, actually.” Her eyes lifted thoughtfully toward the ceiling as she tried to recall them. “Psilocin, for one, and some phallotoxins. Other than gemweed, not many fungal or botanical poisons that you’d actually use in combat – some covert ops applications, maybe. And no elapine resistances,” she picked up the bottle of cobra venom as an example, “but I have diminished responses to several dozen adder and viper venoms.”

Before he could marshal his resolve to speak again without his voice shaking, she reluctantly returned the vial to its place in the box.

“Kankurō-dono…” She chewed on her lower lip, brushing her messy curls out of her face. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but this is really unnecessary. I only did what anybody would have done.”

Resolutely slamming the door on the screaming in his mind, he fixed Kumi with a frank look.

“Anybody?” he echoed, cocking his head to one side. “Most people would have left when I asked them to. If they were really concerned, they would have sent for a medic, against my wishes. As soon as they could slough responsibility for an uncomfortable situation, they would have. You didn’t do that. You stuck with it as best you could, as sensitively as you could, against a directive from a superior. I respect that.”

He drew a deep breath.

“I _appreciate_ that.” Gesturing dismissively, he added, “And I was sort of an ass, so, there’s that.”

Kumi opened her mouth to argue again, but, frowning with consternation, decided against it. Then she picked up the wooden box beside her and set it in her lap, fingering the decoratively beveled edges.

“This is really generous, Kankurō-dono,” she said quietly, bowing again. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll be annoyed if you manage to kill yourself with them. So, do not tamper with Trip or with the marrow root,” he warned her again. Sighing heavily, he added, “And when you decide to dick around with them in spite of every warning to the contrary, call me. I’ll supervise.”

“I promise.” She flashed that falsely innocent smile, but it faded quickly. “I really thought you would be angry with me for intruding. I felt terrible about it.”

“Forget it. You did what you felt you had to do.” He shrugged. “You’ve got guts, kid.”

She shook her head emphatically and sat down across from him. “That’s not it. At least,” she amended, “that’s not why I stayed.”

He looked at her and waited, still too unnerved to encourage her. Kum’s bare toes curled inward, and she blushed.

“The most powerful man in Suna offered to help me with my grandfather,” she said. “I turned him down, right?”

“A stupid decision, although I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”

“No? I stayed with you,” her green eyes flashed with amusement, “thinking you probably would have made the same stupid decision.”

After a moment’s silence, he burst into surprised laughter.

“You’re a little smartass,” he wheezed, “did you know that?”

“Common knowledge,” she said with a winsome smile. “But was I right?”

With a wave of his hand, he conceded the point.

“Thought so,” she said with satisfaction. “Of course,” she added slyly, “I do _usually_ deign to accept help when I can no longer move under my own power.”

He crooked a finger at her, and after hesitating briefly, she leaned forward. With a speed born of endless drills, he raised his hand and thumped her solidly on the forehead.

Kumi yelped and scrambled away from him.

“That’s for disrespecting your elders,” he said, and with a dignified nod, he settled back against the wall.

“OW!" Rubbing furiously at the red spot on her head, she glared at him. “Cripes, I think I have a concussion! Are my pupils dilated?”

He chuckled. “Your pupils are fine. Your reflexes need work.”

“I trusted you!” she accused. “My guard was down!”

“If you don’t like asking for help, you probably shouldn’t let your guard down.”

She glowered at him but couldn’t maintain it. Her ire dissolved into helpless giggles.

Kankurō watched her in silence, and his stoicism made her laugh even harder. The tiny puppeteer who had squared off with Nozara Nobu and bested him was intelligent and iron-willed. She was also a little girl: a trifle silly, occasionally giggly, and thirsty for praise. One day in the not-too-distant future, the silliness would pass. The giggles would abate and drop in pitch, perhaps rivaling her mother’s rich laughter someday. Her childish earnestness would solidify into ambition and personal drive.

Nozara Kumi was a bizarre mixture of little girl and deadly kunoichi, an ephemeral work of art, beautiful, shifting, ever-evolving, and no one was even watching.

It was a fucking crime.

“Kumi-chan.”

Kumi stopped rubbing at the sore spot, but left her hand pressed to her forehead. “Hmmm?”

He reached into her folio, where he had stashed the apprenticeship contract.

“I have a proposition for you.”

 

* * *

 

 

When he left her with Kawamura for her physical, Kumi was glowing like a small sun, radiating joy.

For his part, Kankurō made his way home from the hospital slowly, lost in thought. Under one arm he carried his ponderous medical file. He had a vague notion of slapping the thing on the table and letting Temari and Gaara have a go at it – he’d do it, if he thought could get away with it. The file bulged with scans, Kawamura’s notes, and prescription records – only the tests from today were missing.

Kawamura, with her usual imperturbability, had explained the mechanics of the test that morning. In sum: it was simple, it was conclusive, and the results would be available about seven hours after she had Kumi’s sample in hand. Would Kankurō prefer a phone call, e-mail, or text?

As he passed through the familiar streets, he felt as though he walked through a peculiar darkness, formless and unknown, but oddly nonthreatening. As with the false thrills of a horror house or an amusement park ride, his mind remained anchored by a certainty, perhaps of purpose rather than safety, and the fear only titillated, failing to pitch his soul to the winds. He meant to see the little genin safe and mentored, regardless of her paternity. The test’s results could only alter the scope and shape of his obligations; it would not negate them.

He turned his mind resolutely to the impending conversation with his siblings. The longer he thought about Kumi, and the more he grew inured to the shock, the less fearful he became. And he didn’t dare surrender his fear. Because if it wasn’t fear that made his heart pound and his hands sweat, it was something else, something far more treacherous.

Like all soldiers who lived to be veterans, Kankurō had learned to be comfortable with fear. It kept him safe, made him go canny, forced him to remain alert. So long as he could retain perspective enough to do what needed doing in spite of it, fear could be a soldier’s best friend.

Hope, on the other hand, was a capricious bitch.


	8. Messes

It lacked half an hour to seven o’clock when Temari arrived at Kankurō’s door. She let herself in with her own key; he wasn’t home yet – or, if he was, he was buried in his crypt-like workroom, tinkering with weaponry or mixing poisons in the company of his silent, motionless comrades. His personal favorites, Karasu, Kuroari, and Sanshōuo, were like old, quiet teammates, and she didn’t mind them, but the myriad figures suspended from his basement ceiling were strangers. Their unpainted, rough-hewn faces and inhumanly poised limbs unnerved her. She usually avoided his workroom, claiming it was smelly and stifling.

Despite the state of his workshop, Kankurō kept house somewhat better than most bachelors of her acquaintance; which was to say, there were no dishes in the sink, and no dirty clothes on the floor, and the trash bin wasn’t overflowing. Like his puppets, his home was utilitarian and minimalistic, so there wasn’t much in the way of clutter, either. It was a little dusty – she’d give it a good scrub before she went home, for all the good it would do – and he was forever tracking up sawdust from his projects, so she would have to sweep, too. Still, all in all, it wasn’t bad. Her family would have her own home in much direr straits by now.

The day before she was due to return, Shikamaru would beg his friend Chouji for help, and the big, gentle man would take pity on his lackadaisical friend, cleaning house in exchange for BBQ.

That was fine by her. When she came home, it would be to a sparkling kitchen and polished floors. Chouji’s pretty little wife was a kunoichi from Kumo, and a powerful advocate of shared household responsibilities, and Chouji could often be found wearing an apron over his clothes while at home. Some of the more traditional women in Konoha pitied Chouji his choice of a foreign wife, with her absurd expectations that he should sweep floors and wash laundry. Unremarked went the fact that after fifteen years, the couple remained deeply and unabashedly in love with one another, and Temari suspected most of Karui’s detractors were simply jealous. For his part, Chouji maintained that as much time as his wife spent preparing meals for his voracious family – and Karui was a very good cook – she was entitled to leave the dishes for someone else.

Kankurō’s refrigerator was nearly empty, his cupboards bare but for protein bars and instant noodles, and his rice cooker had dust in it. No wonder there were no dishes in the sink.

As always when she visited, Temari was impressed with the certainty that this place needed a woman’s touch, and that Kankurō needed a good deal more than that. She sighed, thinking of her husband’s teammate and his family. If Chouji could satisfy such a powerful, beautiful woman, there was absolutely no reason her intelligent, attractive, and talented brother shouldn’t also be happily married.

Why he wouldn’t just settle down with someone, she couldn’t comprehend. Unlike their shy and placid little brother, Kankurō regularly sought out female companionship, but these were brief interludes; there had been no string of girlfriends, no trail of broken hearts. Outside a few particular “friends” to whom he returned to now and again, all of whom were as firmly opposed to entangling relationships as Kankurō seemed to be, he rarely saw the same woman more than once.

“Fuck-buddies,” Shikamaru called these “friends.” Temari had an even crasser term for them, though she never dared use it, for fear Shikadai would hear her.

“Failed inspection, did I?”

Kankurō appeared behind her with a sardonic grin. He wore no paint and had left off his hood. Without them, he looked astonishingly like their father, except that his hair was a dark ash brown, rather than auburn.

“Only your provisions,” she said, recovering herself. “Good grief, Kankurō.”

“Yeah, I could stand to go shopping. But I’m in the Square most of the time, so I usually eat there.”

“Street food and sushi on a shelf, I suppose.”

“Better than protein bars?”

“Marginally.”

He rubbed her upper arm briskly, unusually demonstrative as he reached past her, for one of the lonely-looking beers in his refrigerator. “Lay off, would ya? I’m not in the mood to fight with you.”

She crossed her arms and leveled a disbelieving stare at him. “Not in the mood to fight? Kankurō, on the day you were born you grabbed a fistful of my hair, and the louder I screamed, the harder you pulled. You haven’t left off antagonizing me for a minute since then.”

“We’ve had our moments. I didn’t tease you at all on the day you got married.”

“No, but you decked Shikamaru and my groom has a visibly blackening eye in all my wedding pictures.”

He laughed suddenly, a rare, pleasant laugh empty of his usual innuendo, mockery, or wickedly black humor. “Cripes, I’d forgotten that. That wasn’t even his fault, really. He shouldn’t have laughed, though.”

“What happened?” Temari poked him in the arm. “Shikamaru never would tell me.”

“Well, it was Sai that made the comment. I didn’t know him well enough at the time to realize he honestly didn’t know any better.” His brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Hell, I don’t think he was even _trying_ to be funny.”

“But what did he say?”

Kankurō shook his head. “Something I didn’t want to hear, that’s all. It was complimentary, and true, besides, but not something a man wants to hear about his sister.”

“ _What_ , for pity’s sake?”

He grinned. “Not a chance, Temi-chan. You’re a beautiful woman and men notice it. That’s all I have to say about that.”

She flushed a little – both compliments and honorifics from her brother were unusual. He pulled out another beer and handed it to her.

“What’s going on, Kankurō?”

For a moment, he was still, and then he gave her a crooked smile. “Be patient. Gaara will be here soon, yeah?”

“Gaara’s here now,” the Kazekage put in, entering the kitchen quietly. Temari hadn’t heard the door open – a remarkable feat, considering that he carried a pair of crinkly plastic take-out bags. “And he brought dinner.”

“I was going to order,” Kankurō protested.

“But you haven’t,” Gaara replied, calmly. “I knew Temari would get here early to check up on you, and I knew it would take you about ten minutes to get aggravated, so I brought food to break up the squabble.”

Kankurō chuckled in surprise. “Not today, brother,” he said. “We’re playing nicely.”

Gaara set the bags on Kankurō’s table and began unpacking plastic containers. “Only because you’ve got something to tell us, and you know we’re going to argue later.”

Temari stiffened, but Kankurō only grimaced. “I wouldn’t mind skipping over that last bit.”

“No such luck, Aniki. Get the chopsticks, would you, please, Temari?” He frowned at the bags; he never had liked the cheap wooden ones that restaurants handed out, although she had thankfully convinced him not to carry his own everywhere he went. She obliged and followed her brothers to the rooftop. No one had even glanced at the dusty kitchen table.

Like many homes in Suna, Kankurō’s had a rounded shape and took advantage of the limited rainfall and pleasant winter temperatures by utilizing roof space as living areas. The terraces – there were two, the one here on the second floor and one atop his bedroom – were the only truly inviting places in Kankurō’s otherwise sparsely furnished home. The puppeteer had a large circle of casual friends (though, like his lovers, there were only a handful to whom he was deeply attached), and he entertained on the rooftop, which had necessitated a table and chairs and an assortment of floor pillows for additional seating. Along the base of the low half-wall enclosing the terrace were a number of attractively potted, low-maintenance succulents. That had been Gaara’s handiwork, of course. A female colleague from the Theatre had selected the brightly patterned floor pillows and the outdoor rug, as well as the coordinating cushions on the chairs.

She was gay, as Temari had been bluntly informed when she inquired after the acquaintance.

The table sat before a built-in fireplace; Kankurō had stacked the logs and kindling before they arrived and lit it when they went up to eat. One of the table’s four chairs had been relegated to a corner of the roof, so that Temari, who sat directly across from the hearth, had an unimpeded view of the merrily crackling fire. Though Gaara and Kankurō both seemed to relish the warmth, dragging their chairs nearer the flames to enjoy it, Temari had been too long away. The dry coolness of evenings in her native land felt positively toasty compared to early winter in Konoha.

It was almost pleasant. Kankurō ate better than he had the night before, if without enthusiasm, but the firelight cast deep shadows in his face. He’d lost more weight than she’d realized, considerably more, and perhaps even more worrisome was his obvious distraction.

Ordinarily an appallingly proficient actor, Kankurō rarely allowed any sign of unease to creep into his manner. They made small talk, about the sights and pleasures of Shiroiya, about their mutual friends in Konoha, about Shikadai and Shinki. Kankurō followed along ably enough, but at his side, his fingers twitched with agitation, manipulating imaginary chakra threads. It was a very old and endearing habit from his childhood, and so ingrained he probably didn’t even realize he was doing it. It was also the one tell on which she could always rely – he was definitely upset about something.

 “Alright,” he said finally, after Temari cleared the table. “I guess I’ve put this off long enough.

He rose and walked to the orphaned chair in the corner. Reaching over the back – which Temari now realized had been facing them for a reason – he picked up a thick manila folder and returned to place in the center of the table. Then he sat and pulled one foot into his chair, with his knee drawn up to his chest like a child’s.

He met Gaara’s expressionless eyes regretfully. “I’m sorry, Gaara-kun. I’m not going to be able to manage your security in Shiroiya this time.”

 

* * *

 

 

_Six months_ , Temari screamed inwardly, staring at him white-faced as he spoke, not trusting herself to open her mouth. _Six_ months _, the stupid bastard_.

Sakura could have seen him, ages ago. He admitted he was getting worse, and he hadn’t even looked beyond Suna for medical knowledge, hadn’t told his own goddamned siblings he was ill, hadn’t done a bloody damn thing to help himself!

Gods, what if it were cancer? Some tiny, malicious little tumor, creeping though his brain, eating away his life while he sat on his goddamned thumbs. Or something else, some rare degenerative disease, something they could barely diagnose, let alone treat?

What would they do?                                                                                                   

At her left, Gaara was solemn but composed.

Kankurō focused on him, avoiding Temari’s eyes, answering the Kazekage’s questions with detached lucidity, as if he’d known all along he must eventually deliver a full accounting. He reported the results of his tests, detailed his physician’s recommendations, listed the medications he had been prescribed, and acknowledged how much weight he had lost – ten _fucking_ kilos – but anything remotely subjective remained cloaked behind his charcoal-colored eyes. Regarding his symptoms, he had little to say beyond ‘headache and nausea;’ of his thoughts, frustrations, or fears, he revealed nothing at all.

Gaara received each cold fact with equanimity and impassively pressed for more, so that the brothers traded words like playing cards, as if Kankurō’s life might not be riding on the outcome of the game.

Temari was nearly mad with the urge to scream when her youngest brother suddenly narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

“Tell me about the migraines.”

For one infinitesimal moment, Kankurō’s mask slipped.

He could evade an open-ended question, skirt the issue as far as he could, or pare it down to something so specific as to be meaningless. But he wouldn’t refuse to answer a direct question, and he wouldn’t lie. Not to Gaara.

“I… don’t –”

“What do they feel like?”

Kankurō shifted uncomfortably, and Temari shot a glance at her youngest brother. There it was, she saw it, and some small sense of camaraderie eased her panic. The line of his mouth was very straight – not pressed together, nothing so obvious, just very controlled and very straight.

Gaara was furious.

“I dunno. Just a really bad headache, yeah?”

“Do you know when they’re coming?”

“Usually.”

“How?”

“I get really thirsty. And antsy. Can’t sit still.”

“How frequent are the attacks?”

Kankurō sank back into his chair, wary of the onslaught of questions.

“Uh… couple, three times a week.” He sighed. “More like three or four,” he admitted reluctantly, “the last month or so.”

Gaara nodded. “And how long do they last?”

Kankurō raised his hands, agitated. “I don’t know, Gaara – it varies. Two hours. Twelve. All fucking day, sometimes.”

“On our mission to Teina, that rogue shinobi that attacked us shattered your kneecap,” Gaara returned, not missing a beat. “Did that hurt more than the migraines?”

Kankurō’s eyes went blank, but his jaw and throat worked painfully. He looked away and didn’t answer.

“Kankurō.”

“It’s about like that,” he answered slowly, as if dredging up the words was an unbearable effort. “I… I can’t think. Can’t…” He exhaled sharply.

“Where it says ‘debilitating,’” he said, almost choking on the word as he flung a hand toward the medical file, “it means ‘I can’t fucking move.’”

Temari’s stomach plummeted and her anger grew cold. He really hadn’t meant to be unkind or reckless.

Her stupid little brother was just terribly and desperately ashamed.

_“I do it!” he screamed, his little red face screwed up with fury. “I take care of me!”_

_He was certainly trying, but he was making more of a mess trying to clean up his vomit than he had by throwing up. The stomach bug that had attacked the nursery kids hit him harder than most – partially because he refused to take any medicine._

_“Come here, little man,” their father said, picking up the feverish, squirmy little boy in one arm and neatly clearing away the mess with his free hand. The three-year-old hadn’t quite managed to make it to the toilet before being sick, but he had gotten as far as the tiled bathroom._

_“Lemme down!” Kankurō shrieked, beating the Fourth with his chubby little fists. “I do it, I do it!”_

_Ill and enraged, he promptly threw up again, all over his father. Four-year-old Temari gasped._

_“Kankurō-chan! Look what you did!”_

_But Daddy only chuckled. “Yuck,” he observed, peeling off his shirt and wiping Kankurō’s mouth with it before dropping it in the bathroom sink. “Let’s get you some water, then it’s bed for you, little man. Temi-chan, get me a fresh shirt, would you, please? Middle drawer in my room. And be careful not to pull the whole drawer out on top of yourself this time, yeah? I’ll take care of your brother.”_

_Finally spent, Kankurō started to cry. “Mmm sorry,” he sobbed, clutching at his father’s neck. “Mmm sorry, mmm sorry…”_

_“Cripes, kid,” Daddy said. “Even grown-ups make messes they can’t clean up alone.” He sighed and cradled his son’s head to his shoulder. “Believe me, son. I’ve made a few myself.”_

Temari shoved her chair away from the table and rose abruptly, cutting off Gaara’s next question as she fled back into the house.

“Temari…” Kankurō rose as well, but Gaara waved him down impatiently, and before Temari had gotten to the bottom of the stairs, her youngest brother was halfway down the stairwell behind her.

“Nee-chan.” Gaara sounded sympathetic.

“I…” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat as she turned to face him. “I’m fine. I don’t know why I’m surprised. He’s always been like this. Always. Has to do everything on his own. Bloody counter-dependent bastard.”

He came to the bottom of the stairs and reached for her. “He’s trying, Temari.”

She pulled away. “No, he’s not. He just can’t hide it anymore. He doesn’t want support or sympathy or advice, he just wants us to acknowledge that he has it under control and then leave him the hell alone. He’ll tell us just enough to get us off his case.”

“Nee-chan –”

“Did you hear him?” she demanded shrilly. “Three or four times a week, he’s in such pain he can’t move. Do you think it occurred to him, even once, that having someone nearby during those times might be a good idea? That being helpless and alone might be dangerous? What if there was a fire? He doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him – what if he suddenly started seizing? Or passed out in that basement dungeon of his?”

“I heard him. It made my blood run cold.”

She snuffled and swiped at an errant tear, as Gaara continued, gently, “He is who he is. Remote, and… and proud, and ferociously self-reliant.” He shook his head. “He’s a bloody tiger, Nee-chan. I wouldn’t change him, even if I could.”

“Then what,” she asked, raising her chin in defiance, “do you suggest we do, Kazekage-sama?”

Frowning at her combative tone – or possibly just the title, he still had a tough time interpreting intonation and nonverbal cues – he answered, “I will stand beside him, as he has always stood beside me, for as long as he will allow it. You may do as you please.”

Smiling faintly, he added, “You will, in any case. If he’s a tiger, I suppose you’re a lioness; you can’t disregard a threat to any one of us. And I wouldn’t change you, either.”

Sniffing again, she crossed her arms and held herself tightly. “If we’re great cats, what does that make you, Gaara-kun?”

He considered for a moment, squinting thoughtfully up the dim stairwell, where Kankurō stood, silent and grim.

“Some kind of monitor lizard, I think.” He smiled again, amused with himself, but his good humor fled as his eyes adjusted to the light. Temari took an anxious step toward him.

“Kankurō,” he said sharply, not taking his eyes off his brother. “What’s happened? What’s the matter?”

"Come up. Please.”

He spoke with a quiet deference that was as alien to his smart-mouthed brashness as snow to the desert. In a terrifying contrast, his eyes were wide and wild as they left Gaara’s, seeking Temari’s.

Temari lunged forward as if compelled, taking the stairs two at a time, with Gaara on her heels. Kankurō returned to the roof, his hand white-knuckled as he gripped a railing he usually ignored.

“I think,” he said, standing in the center of the roof, his gaze darting around him, “you can conceal yourselves in the doorway. So just… stay there and listen. I can’t… I don’t think I can do this twice.”

In the firelight, he looked deathly ill.

“Kankurō,” she began, starting toward him.

His head shook violently, frenzied, as he backed away from her. “No – stay. There. She –” He swallowed with difficulty, and his breath came much too quickly. “Please hide. She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Who will, Kankurō?” she demanded, growing more frightened by the moment. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll be here,” Gaara assured him, taking Temari firmly by the arm and drawing her back into the shadows of the little, walled-off alcove where the hallway emerged onto the roof. “Concealed.”

“But, Gaara –”

“Leave him be.” The Kazekage knelt and pulled her down with him. More quietly, he added, “I’m not sure we’ll get a sensible answer out of him just now, anyway. I’ve never seen him like this.”

Neither had Temari, and it terrified her.

Kankurō stalked back and forth across the rooftop, muttering rapidly and unintelligibly to himself as he paced, recalling the tiger to which Gaara had compared him, prowling its cage, confined, edgy, and unpredictable. The flickering firelight toyed cruelly with his shadow, casting writhing and chaotic shapes on the rooftop as he moved. Several times a minute, he walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the Village as it drowsed in the chill evening, until at last he caught sight of what he had been looking for.


	9. Plum Wine

“Kankurō-dono?”

The little girl spotted him on the rooftop and called up to him from the street, her white face upturned in the glow of the streetlight.

Steadying himself with a deep breath, Kankurō motioned for her to join him.

Kumi’s small, black-clad form burst over the top of the half-wall and came to rest in a crouching perch upon it. She had Naruki slung over her shoulder. The puppet’s lustrous, silky coiffure lay on her shoulder, in stark contrast to the genin’s own windblown curls, which were badly in need of a brushing.

Skinny and quick, she called to mind an adolescent kitten, but tangles notwithstanding, she was a pretty little thing. He hadn’t noticed before; her luminous green eyes dominated her face, so that at first blush they overshadowed the fineness of her features. Her smooth brow and wide cheekbones gave way to a fragile jaw, and her skin was so pale that he could clearly see the blue veins of her throat. Her lips were full, like her mother’s, but Rira’s mouth had been generous, with a smile that stretched across her face. Kumi’s was smaller, rounder, suited to her narrow jaw and pointed chin. She would be a beauty one day, some lucid part of his brain noted as he stared at her, tongue-tied.

Kumi took one side of that full lower lip between her teeth and blinked her great green eyes solemnly at him, shifting in her perch; he had been silent too long, and she was growing nervous.

“You’re gonna want to sit,” Kankurō said to her finally, motioning to one of the wicker chairs.

Kumi glanced at the proffered seat but shook her head cautiously, possibly realizing Kankurō wasn’t quite himself.

“I’m alright, thanks.”

She spoke with casual unconcern and arranged herself more securely atop the wall, but she kept one leg folded under her. Ready to bolt, should the need arise. For one breathless moment, he would have liked to bolt himself.

“Suit yourself,” he said neutrally. His eyes fell closed briefly as he mustered his reserves; and then he gave her a rueful look.

“I’m not usually so inept, so bear with me, alright?”

“You had a rough night,” the genin observed, her tone dry.

“I’ve had a rough couple of nights,” he corrected.

She relaxed slightly with this confession and nodded an acknowledgement.

“Anyway.” He gestured around the rooftop. “I apologize for calling you here so late. I told you, I’m not a patient guy.”

A smile ghosted over the little girl’s mouth. “Most of Suna knows that, Kankurō-dono.”

He cracked a halfhearted smile, and then he slumped into one of the chairs. “You remember I spoke with the Kazekage about you?” he asked after a moment, squinting up at her.

“You mentioned it.”

“I didn’t realize, until I was talking with him, that you were Nozara Rira’s daughter.”

Kumi’s fine black brows swept upward. “You knew my mom?”

“Not really, no,” he hedged. “But I did meet her once, at a party. Mutual friend.” His stomach knotted, and he had to force himself to meet her eyes. “There was… drinking. A lot of it. I got drunk. She got drunk. And we did what a lot of drunk twenty-somethings do.”

“Kankurō-dono,” Kumi said, incredulous and apparently amused, “are… are you trying to tell me you slept with my mother?”

He laughed suddenly, surprising himself. Temari would be scandalized, but Kumi’s quick understanding – and complete lack of embarrassment – was a tremendous relief. It made things easier, at least, that he hadn’t been forced to spell it out for her.

“You don’t mince words, do you,” he muttered. “Something else we have in common.”

“I suppose…” Kumi took a breath to ask him something, but he cut her off.

“Kumi-chan… that party,” he said, steeling himself, “where I met your mother. We were celebrating Mitsuo Tamaki’s promotion to jounin rank. That was in the spring of 3352. Seven months and a bit before you were born.”

He leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms, still staring at her intently. “That is why asked you to agree to a physical before signing the apprenticeship contract. I wanted a blood sample to compare against mine.”

For a moment, Kumi’s face became an unmoving mask, her eyes as blank and sightless as her puppet’s. Then she straightened, so that she stood on the wall. Her little round mouth trembled with a question, but her voice failed her.

She licked her lips and tried again, looking down at Kankurō wide-eyed, breathing unevenly.

“You… you don’t mean…”

Kankurō nodded grimly.

“Wait… but…” She blinked rapidly, thinking. Finally, she asked, in a strangled voice, “Who ran the… the test?”

“Dr. Kawamura.” Kankurō had resisted the urge to fidget, but now his fingernails raked his scalp as he ran his hands through his hair. “I’ll give you her phone number, so you can confirm it with her. You don’t have to take my word for it.”

“I have it,” Kumi answered with an agitated shake of her head, “she’s my… my clinicals instructor… She was sure?” she demanded.

“It was conclusive.”

Her cat’s eyes were so wide that they were nearly round, winging upward only slightly at the outside corners. Panicked.

“Come down,” he told her sharply, “before you fall down.”

Kumi obeyed as if in a daze, clambering silently off the wall. She laid her puppet on the ground before making her way to one of the floor cushions. Sinking to the floor, she gathered herself onto the oversized pillow, pulling her knees up so that she crouched in a fetal position. Once she was securely ensconced, her stunned gaze wandered back to Kankurō.

“You were right,” she observed weakly. “About the chair.”

He nodded and rose, and, gripping the wall, he lifted himself to sit on the edge of it. “I didn’t know, Kumi-chan,” he said quietly, not quite pleading. “Please believe me, kid. I didn’t know.”

“I… no, I know.” Her curls quivered with a short, negative jerk of her head. “Mom told me that my… that you… didn’t know about me.” She gave him a strange look. “What were you drinking?”

 Kankurō mussed his hair again, abstracted. “What?”

“You said you were drinking that night, with… with Mom. What were you drinking?” She swallowed hard, and when she spoke again, her voice was thin and cracked. “Do you remember?”

“Plum wine,” he answered, after a pause.

Kumi’s face crumbled, and she buried it in her hands, trying not to cry and failing, choking on a pitiful sound she couldn’t quite swallow.

“Cripes – kid! Kumi-chan!”

The little girl mashed the heels of her hands into her eyes, and in the space of a breath, he had detached himself from the wall and was on his knees beside her.

“Sorry. That’s…” Kumi swiped impatiently at her tears. “That’s all Mom would drink.” With a valiant effort, she gathered herself, breathing deeply, if irregularly.

“It was her favorite. Because… because she said she…” Her voice broke completely. “She wouldn’t have me, if it weren’t for plum wine.”

At her feet, Kankurō bowed his head.

For several long minutes, only the night breeze stirred on the rooftop, chilly, but gentle. Kankurō’s street was generally quiet; the windows of many houses were dark already. Somewhere in the distance, a dog yelped, and two others answered it, one with a deep, rumbling bark and the other with a nerve-wracking yipping. Locust song hummed from the direction of the spring-fed lake that formed the heart of the oasis which provided Suna with its water. And as always, the wind whispered around them. But on the rooftop, the puppet master only heard the beating of his heart in his ears, and Kumi’s quiet, hitched breathing.

He waited in silence as she struggled to regain her composure, finally able to consider the implications for himself. Never one to worry about potentially defunct bridges, he hadn’t taken an opportunity to look ahead at what might be coming down the line if he had to cross this one. Watching Kumi now, he wondered whether he ought to have waited a day or two and given himself some time to process the initial shock. Temari would have advised it, and probably Gaara would have backed her. But Kankurō dismissed the thought immediately.

It would have been patently unfair to meet Kumi on unequal terms at this, their first encounter as father and daughter. But as the lamplight gleamed on Kumi’s wet cheeks, and her small, even white teeth clamped down on her lip, threatening to draw blood, a peculiar feeling came over him. That lip.

Embarrassed, nervous, frightened, angry – the slightest surge of adrenaline triggered her lip-biting. He’d seen it dozens of times, and he’d known her less than a week. She was scared.

So he couldn’t afford to be.

As if a switch had been flipped, Kankurō relaxed, shedding his anxiety like an ill-fitted coat. The stiffness in his neck and shoulders dissipated, and his alarmed expression eased into familiar lines of insouciance. With a casual hand, he reached down and tapped the little girl’s foot.

“Don’t move, yeah?” He smiled crookedly, but as warmly as he could manage.

Kumi snuffled and blinked at her tears, clearly embarrassed by her inability to staunch them, but nodded shortly. He rose and went to the bar, near where his siblings sat in the recessed doorway. Green eyes – probably three pairs of them – followed him closely as he busied himself behind the counter with an electric kettle and a tin of matcha. Like any bachelor, he had perfected the use of most convenience items, but he never had caught on to bagged tea. He made it the old-fashioned way, with matcha powder and a bamboo whisk, and if called upon, was perfectly capable of performing a flawless tea ceremony.

When the water was nearly boiling, he poured it into a matched pair of tea bowls – a gift from Temari, incidentally. The steam rose in lazy, comfortable swirls through the evening air as he carried them back to Kumi, whose tears had subsided as he worked. Handing the little girl one of the bowls, he sipped carefully at his own, eying her over the rim.

Kumi murmured her thanks. She breathed in the fragrant steam appreciatively before tasting it. Then she looked up, a bit surprised. “It’s really good.”

“It’s simple.” He shrugged. “Most people just serve it too hot. Or they use too much tea.”

She managed a hesitant smile, but it soon faltered, and she bent over her tea bowl with her eyes lowered.

There would have been something distasteful, perhaps even cowardly, in the advantage of preparation, Kankurō reflected, as he and Kumi quietly drank their tea. Even as he fumbled for the right words to say and scrambled for the barest outlines of a plan, he didn’t regret having declined to take it.

Still, there were inherent and undeniable inequalities in their new roles: Kumi was, very loosely speaking, a subordinate. And while he had little experience with children, in the past twenty years Kankurō had led dozens, if not hundreds, of shinobi into battle. Once he could see Kumi as an unnerved and overwhelmed junior, it became clear that he lacked the luxury of hysteria.

“Kankurō-dono…” Kumi began carefully, composed at last and cradling her tea bowl in her hands, “what happens now?”

Rather than answer, he gestured at the still-glowing hearth.

“Come sit by the fire, kid. It’s as cold as a yuki-ona’s tits.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she observed drily.

Kankurō, who often retreated into humor when unsettled, flashed a knowing smile at her.

“Well, take my word for it. I’ve known my fair share.” He jerked a thumb toward the table. “But maybe while we talk, you can help me with a project I’ve been meaning to get around to. I think better when I’ve got something to tinker with.”

Her lips twitched in a knowing smile of her own, and she nodded, unfolding herself from her cramped position on the pillow with the fluidity of the very young. As she took a seat by the fire, still sipping at her tea, Kankurō flipped open the lid of a storage bench and hauled out a heavy box of half-fashioned puppet limbs. He often carved up here in the evening, when it was pleasant out, avoiding the workshop and its heavy fragrances of oil and polish and sawdust.

“Done much hardwood carving?” he asked over his shoulder, as it occurred to him that all that he had seen of her work had seen had been in lightweight balsa, malleable plastics, and steel. He rummaged through the box for a matched pair of roughly cylindrical pieces of acacia, each with a single hole bored through its length. He found the model he’d had in mind when he started this particular puppet and pulled off its upper arm.

“Some. That’s clever,” Kumi remarked, craning her neck. “That’s your scale model? Does the whole thing pop apart like that?”

He held up the armless, 300 cm puppet and neatly popped off its head in reply. “Makes the individual bits easier to reference for drafts and prototypes,” he acknowledged.

“Some kind of plastic in the joints?” She got her knees under her, rising up for a better view. “Seems like it would be a pain to mold.”

“It was initially,” he answered.

As he’d hoped, veering off into puppetry seemed to calm her somewhat; her eyes had that familiar, curious gleam in them. It had amused him, before. Now it provoked a different sensation, something akin to pride.

“But,” he continued, “all my humanoid scale models are the same size, so I’ve reused the molds many times. Heads up.” He tossed her the model, which she plucked out of the air and promptly disassembled.

Then she wrinkled her nose, flipping up a miniature blade concealed in the arm. “What is this? It’s awfully simplistic.”

“Well, it’s meant to be, yeah?” He brought the unformed arms to her and laid them on the table. “I noticed at the Academy that there’s a serious jump in complexity from the level one training puppets and the level twos. I wound up with first year puppetry students who had mastered the basics and needed something more challenging, but they didn’t have fine enough control to effectively train with the level two puppets. So, I figured I’d try my hand at making an intermediate model. It fell off my radar after I quit teaching, but I always intended to get back to it.”

He sat down across from her and rolled one cylinder across the table. More carefully, he passed a large woodcarving blade to her. “Want to shape an arm for me?”

Kumi picked up the knife, which looked ridiculous and unwieldy in her childish hands.

“Is that gonna be manageable for you?” he asked doubtfully. “I didn’t think about your grip being so small.”

“It’s fine. I’m used to it,” she answered, flipping the knife expertly and beginning to scrape the wood. She glanced briefly at the model, but otherwise did not look up from her task.

He filed the remark away under ‘potential gifts’ and picked up the second cylinder.

They carved in a fairly comfortable silence for a few minutes, whittling away at the ends of the roughly shaped arms. From where he sat, he could detect the faint outlines of Gaara and Temari’s concealment jutsus in the doorway, and for a moment wondered what on earth they must be thinking just now. With a sigh, he put them out of his mind while he could and tried to focus on Kumi.

“Tomorrow,” he began after a few moments’ thought, “I am going to the Records Hall to find out what I have to do to be legally recognized as your father.”

Damn, but he got that out clearly. Kumi stopped carving and looked up at him, warily motionless.

“I suspect,” he continued seriously, still whittling at the wood, “that the Council will request another blood test, with witnesses. There could also be some kind of hearing, possibly, depending on custom and precedent and what your mother left in her Final Disposition. Hopefully not. So, the answer to your question about what happens next is: a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit. Tedious, but with luck, not too complicated.”

“And when the… when that’s done, where does that leave us?”

He closed a fist around the comfortable weight of his knife. “Presumably, it places you in my custody, until you achieve chuunin rank or turn seventeen.”

The little pink mouth puckered faintly as she forced out a breath, and the green eyes retreated to the fire.

“Nervous about that, are you?” he asked casually, beginning to carve again.

One side of her bottom lip went between her teeth.

“Out with it, kid,” he advised, as her lip turned white. “The next few months are going to be awkward. You and I have too much ground to cover to be walking on eggshells. You say what you need to say and ask the questions you need to ask; I’m not gonna hold them against you. You do me the same courtesy, and we’ll get through this, yeah?”

Kumi set both the arm and the knife on the table with an unintentionally jarring thump and a clang. She put her hands in her lap.

“Do you want to?” she asked, raising her eyes to him at last. “Be recognized as my father, I mean? Have custody of me?”

Her face seemed even paler, but her gaze was steady. Prepared.

It was gut-wrenching; he knew that look. Hell, he perfected that look. She was waiting for the blow to fall, determined not to cry out no matter how badly it hurt.

“I mean…” Swallowing, she licked her lips nervously and looked again at the fire. “I know… you didn’t ask for this. And you’re not obligated to…” She shook her head, and, failing to find the words, she shrugged. “You know. I won’t tell anyone, if you –”

“What I want and what I’m obligated to do have nothing to do with each other.”

He spoke more sharply than he had intended, stung once again by the notion that anyone could believe he might just walk away from his own flesh and blood. He went on, trying without much success to soften his tone.

“You are my daughter. I am responsible for you. End of story.”

Green eyes snapped back to him, suddenly sharp and intelligent, and he wondered uneasily if he had somehow erred.

“I have been on my own for almost four years,” Kumi replied, her tone flat. “And I’ve done okay. I would _rather_ be on my own than be an unwelcome burden, especially...” She pressed her lips together and didn’t finish the sentence, but she raised her chin in defiance, eyes still flashing.

Kankurō shook his head, cursing his own defensiveness.

“It’s not like that, kid, don’t… that’s not what I meant to say.” He ran a hand through his hair yet again, irritated with himself. “Wants _change_ , Kumi-chan. Obligations don’t, yeah? You and me, whatever there is or will be between us, it will never be subject to a whim. That’s all I was driving at.”

She looked away, unconvinced.

“Relax, kid,” he said wearily. “You were trying to give me an out. I get it. It was big of you. But I don’t need one, and, for the bloody fucking record, I don’t want one.”

He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, debating with himself about how honest he ought to be right now.

Hell with it. He would want the truth. They were alike in many ways; maybe it wasn’t a bad bet to wager that she’d want the same.

“You asked me a yes or no question, and I wish I had a yes or no answer for you. The short answer is yes, I want to be a part of your life. I want you to be a part of mine. The longer answer is that I know exactly jack-shit about raising a kid – even one that’s already half-grown. There’s not much that scares me, Kumi-chan, and there’s less I’d admit to being afraid of, but…”

He quirked a brow at her. “You ever done something that was really exciting and completely fucking terrifying at the same time?”

Her mouth twisted ruefully. “You mean like presenting a tiny surveillance puppet to the man who invented the Black Sand technique and defeated a resurrected Sasori of the Red Sand?”

Giving her a faint smile in acknowledgement, he pivoted, and asked, “What about you? What do you want? Being my kid does come with the perk of getting to dick around with some pretty legendary puppets, I suppose,” he said modestly, “but you would also have to deal with a completely inexperienced parent.”

That coaxed out a smile, as he’d hoped it would, but the flash of warmth faded quickly. “Does it matter, what I want?” she asked bluntly, beginning to carve again.

“Of course it matters.”

Her mouth twisted, silently skeptical.

“I’m not going to leave that “undeclared” on your birth certificate,” he admitted; “I could never look at myself straight again. But…” He raised one shoulder.

“I was a pretty independent kid, myself, yeah? And then, one day, when I was about ten, my old man decided he wanted some say in my life. Like that,” he snapped his fingers, “whatever freedom I’d had was gone. My time wasn’t my own, the Corps was no longer managing my training, and the old man pulled me off my genin team to be retrained with my siblings. Neither of whom I got along with especially well at the time.

“I don’t guess I’ve ever forgiven him for that. Not for doing it – I realized, later, that he was only doing what was necessary. I’m stronger, Suna is stronger, because of it. But he never once considered that he was taking anything away from me when he did it. He couldn’t take something that he never acknowledged as mine in the first place.”

The little girl’s eyes were glued to his face, and Kankurō felt suddenly embarrassed. Had he ever voiced that resentment aloud? If he had, he hadn’t been sober, because he didn’t remember doing it. Certainly he hadn’t ever admitted it to Gaara or Temari, who had both made their peace with the Fourth ages ago. He didn’t intend to discuss it now, he thought firmly at the indubitably inquisitive shinobi concealed in his doorway.

“Point being,” he said, returning his attention to Kumi, “I can’t make you a lot of promises about what’s going to happen. But whatever happens, you’ll have some say in it – and that I will promise you. You won’t always get what you want; you’re old enough to know life just doesn’t work out that way. But it won’t ever be because I didn’t take it into consideration.”

The night wind tugged at Kumi’s fine flyaway curls, but otherwise the little girl sat motionless in the chair across from him. Thinking. After a long silence, she nodded cautiously, and he gave her a brief smile.

“You were right about one thing, kid,” he allowed. “I didn’t ask for this. But just so you know, I did go looking for it. And not only because I was obligated to.”

He rubbed the nape of his neck. “I did _mean_ to apprentice you, you know. It wasn’t all a pretense. If the results had been negative, I would have done it.”

“Really?”

The imploring look on her face tugged at his heart. She looked as though she wanted very much to believe him; perhaps she had also sensed a kinship, if only in their shared passion for their craft.

“Yeah, I did,” he acknowledged quietly. “Before I ever suspected that... Well, anyway. I knew there was something about you.”

His jaw worked impatiently as he struggled to phrase the thought.

“You’re like me, yeah? You’re a _lot_ like me, in some ways. And I had to know if it was chance or luck or whether I’d had something to do with it, after all. Knowing I did – Hell, Kumi-chan. I don’t have the words. I can’t make it sound as earth-shattering as it is. It’s like a first kill, or a first love, or the first time you lose someone. It’s impossible to explain, but it changes absolutely fucking everything.”

He squinted down at her self-consciously. “That probably doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Her knees drew up to her chest, but Kumi seemed more contemplative than nervous. “Well, I’ve never killed anyone. Or fallen in love. But…” She hugged her legs and her eyes fixed on some indefinite point in the distance. “When Mom died… I guess I was one person on January fifth, and I was someone else on January sixth. Is that kind of what you mean?”

She glanced up at him for affirmation, and he grunted an assent. He wouldn’t have framed the thought in quite those terms, but it captured the disorientation he felt well enough, so the comparison sufficed. One day she had been a daughter, the next she wasn’t. Now she was again.

Half an hour ago he hadn’t been a father. Possibly he _was_ a different person.

More likely, he needed to be.

“Well, you’re not losing a parent this time, but you’re not gaining much of one, either,” he remarked drily. “Still, you’re stuck with me, yeah?” He gave her a sudden smile, feigning confidence for both their sakes. “For what that’s worth, I think we’ll do alright. I’m fairly adaptable. I think you are, too.”

Kumi answered with a small, shy smile. Then, inevitably perhaps, she bit her lip. “I’d like to go with you to the Records Hall, if that’s alright.”

“I don’t see a problem with that. What’ve you got on your plate tomorrow?”

“Clinicals from seven to nine, but that’s all.”

“Seven in morning?” Kankurō frowned; she’d been in his office until three, and then she had gone to the old Theatre to string her scorpion puppet. She couldn’t have slept more than three or four hours before she had wakened to find him in her workshop.

“I’m pretty sure this counts as a family emergency if you want to duck out.”

“The Records Hall won’t be open ‘til nine, anyway,” she pointed out. “I’ll manage.”

“Yeah?” Kankurō raised his brows. “You think you’ll get any sleep tonight? I sure as hell won’t.”

“I may crash sometime tomorrow afternoon,” she admitted. “But I’ll make it through the morning alright.”

“If you’re sure.” He shrugged dubiously.

“I am.” She got to her feet and put the knife and the puppet arm on the table. “Clinicals will be a breeze after tonight.”

“Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

It was a dumb question, he knew it as the words left he mouth, but he had more or less upended her world and he had to ask. Some anxious part of his mind insisted on confirming that he hadn’t permanently damaged her with the shock.

In reply, Kumi’s mouth twitched speculatively.

“Are _you_?”

“Me?”

Caught off-guard, Kankurō blinked at her for a moment, but before he could answer, she clarified.

“You’re… feeling better?”

“Ah.” He crossed his arms. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Is that…” Her voice trailed off. “Sorry. Never mind.”

Sighing, Kankurō crossed the roof to where Naruki lay on the ground, forgotten. Lifting the puppet – it wasn’t quite as heavy as he had anticipated, but it was probably half-again Karasu’s weight – he eyed the porcelain-like mask for a moment or two, considering. Then he returned to Kumi and handed Naruki to her. She shouldered the puppet with practiced ease, but, embarrassed, she couldn’t quite meet Kankurō’s eyes.

“I’ll tell you about it later, yeah?” he said finally. “I had to go through it once already tonight, and I’m not up to doing it again. But it’s nothing urgent, and it’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Hesitating a moment, he reached out and laid a hand on Kumi’s wild black curls. They were fine and soft; he had expected a much coarser texture from the look of them. “I’ll swing by the hospital at nine. We’ll need some breakfast before we face the paperwork.”

Kumi nodded under his hand. Then she went to the half-wall and hopped up on it.

“Kumi-chan,” he said, not quite ready to let her go.

She paused and glanced back at him.

“This… ah…” He rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck and tried again. “This isn’t going to be a bad thing for you, okay?"

After searching his eyes for a moment, Kumi nodded. “I believe you. I just don’t want it to be a bad thing for you, either.”

He gave her something that approximated a smile. “You don’t worry about me, kid. Told you, I’m adaptable.”

She smiled back, briefly, and then she was gone.

When Gaara and Temari stepped out of the alcove, they found him slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. There was a peacefulness in the exhaustion, but he was utterly spent and standing was an unbearable exertion.

“If I did that wrong,” he said, his voice emerging thick and gravelly, despite his best efforts, “keep it to yourselves.”

Temari reached out and raked her fingernails lightly through Kankurō’s mussed hair, a tenderness he would not have permitted, ordinarily. She said nothing, though he knew she must have a thousand objections to what had just happened.

It didn’t matter. Kumi knew the truth and had left him with a smile, anxious, probably, but not terrified. Not devastated. He hadn’t expected her to be thrilled – he wasn’t, though the rage and hurt swirling in the pit of his stomach had very little to do with her.

A sharp and urgent fury swelled within him, painfully at odds with his fatigue.

How in seven hells could a woman could deny a man his own child? Raise it right under his nose, and never say a word? And then leave it, without clan or parents, to fend for itself?

He supposed she hadn’t had much of an example. Her father… Bloody hell, Nozara fucking Nobu. If the bastard were to materialize before him, he would tear the old man’s arms from his body and beat him to death with them.

Gaara bent over his phone, fingers flying over the screen as he dashed off a text or e-mail.

“There.” The Kazekage slid the phone back into a pocket. “My day is clear tomorrow – I can probably help cut through some of the red tape.”

“You didn’t have to do that.” Kankurō didn’t look up.

“Of course I did.”

Temari started at the uncharacteristically sharp note in Gaara’s voice. Anger was an emotion he rarely permitted himself.

“You are not facing all of this alone. Even you have to draw a line somewhere, Aniki. I don’t care how goddamned tough you think you are.”

That hung between them for a long moment, but Temari’s nails continued to run along Kankurō’s scalp, slow, steady, and reassuring. She’d done this to soothe Shikadai as an infant, he recalled absently. She’d done it for Kankurō himself, when they had been small children, imitating her absent mother.

He sat up straight, pulling away from her hand. Temari pressed her lips together, still wordless. Probably still shocked. Gods knew he was.

“Kumi is my responsibility, Gaara-kun,” Kankurō said after a moment, laying his head back against the wall, weary.

“As you like it.” Gaara answered shortly. “You’re mine.”

“You’ve got that backward.” He cracked open a baleful eye to look up at his Kazekage. “ _I’m_ the big brother.”

“And I’m more grateful for that than you’ll ever know,” Gaara replied, softening his tone. “But the fact remains that I care for you; ergo, I have a responsibility toward you. It’s unkind to deny me that.”

Gaara’s unusual forthrightness startled him, and his eyes flew open, but he quickly recovered.

“Nobody says, ‘ergo,’ Gaara-kun,” he answered irritably, and closed his eyes again.

It was as close to an acknowledgement as the Kazekage would receive, and he knew it. He dropped into a crouch beside his siblings. The brothers did not always understand one another, but they knew one another as well as they knew their own souls, and generally manage to accept one another, flaws, follies, and all.

Temari loved her brothers dearly but was somewhat less inclined to countenance their occasional stupidity. She usually forgave Gaara, whose missteps usually arose from ignorance rather than any defect of character. Kankurō, who was simply too damn stubborn to admit when he was in over his head, she had less patience with. He dreaded her remarks; she was by far the expert when it came to children, having aided efforts to relocate the hundreds of them orphaned during the war in addition to raising her own son. He would have no argument to answer her criticisms – only a surer sense of his own inadequacy to the task before him.

For once, however, she seemed disinclined to scold him. “You were very open, with her,” his sister said finally. “Uncharacteristically so. It settled her.”

Reaching over, he silently took her hand in his, another intimacy he would usually have rejected out-of-hand. He could not remember ever having initiated it. But he felt pathetically grateful for Temari’s forbearance just now.

“You found out just before you called her here?” she surmised.

At his nod, she gently squeezed his hand. “Fill us in later. Right now, I think you should have a lie-down – even if you can’t sleep. You look tired, Otouto.”

Gaara nodded his agreement. “We’ll talk in the morning.” He heaved a sigh and rose, looking out over the Village, where Kumi had disappeared into the maze of streets below. “I think I’ve had enough revelations for one night.”

Both his siblings stayed the night, unwilling to leave him alone. Despite the claim he’d made to Kumi, he did manage to fall asleep, although not until he had relived the encounter on the roof half a dozen times and second-guessed all he’d said, recalling and worrying over Kumi’s minutest reactions. He rarely recalled his dreams, but that night he dreamed vividly of his father; his chest was tight and his jaw clenched with anger when he woke.

Although the murmurs of his brother and sister’s voices were still echoing in the stairwell when he had finally dropped off, they were still at it when he woke. He could smell fish and rice; Temari was making breakfast, so someone had been shopping while he slept. Once he’d showered and dressed, he slipped out to the rooftop, where Gaara was coaxing a small flame to life in the hearth.

“Good morning, Aniki.”

“Yo.” Kankurō dropped into one of the chairs, drained despite four hours of sleep. He rested his head in his hands.

“I feel as if I should have known,” Gaara said, taking a seat beside him, looking at the table remorsefully.

“She doesn’t look anything like me, Gaara-kun.”

“No. You were right, though,” the Kazekage returned, with a sidelong glance at him. “She _is_ a lot like you. Aside from her puppetry talents, she’s independent, strong-willed, and resourceful.” His eyes suddenly warmed with amusement. “And not overly concerned about respecting authority.”

Kankurō snorted. “Gaara-kun, you don’t know the half of it.”

Gaara’s eyes grew steadily wider as Kankurō related the truth about Gohachiro’s attack on his cousin, until finally they fell closed in pity.

“Those poor kids.”

Kankurō grunted, not trusting himself to speak.

“I may have to do something more… direct, regarding Gohachiro-kun. I don’t _think_ Nobu’s stupid enough to attack a member of our clan,” Gaara mused, “not even covertly.”

“He’d do either of us in if he thought he could get away with it,” Kankurō replied bluntly. “But hurting Kumi now can only jeopardize his political aims, and he is smart enough to know we’d find him out, eventually.”

They were still discussing possible ways to circumvent any threats the Nozara might still present to Kumi when Temari came up with breakfast to interrupt them.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, without preamble, setting their plates before them and disregarding their existing conversation, “that maybe you _should_ go along with Gaara to the Capital, Kankurō – you and Kumi-chan, both.”

Gaara’s gaze immediately turned speculative, and Kankurō raised his brows in an unspoken ‘why?’ as she took her place between her brothers.

“The gossip is going to be awful, for one,” Temari pointed out with a shrug. “I know you could care less, but it might be hard on Kumi-chan. And frankly, if she’s not terrified of being in the custody of a grown man she barely knows, she’s a hell of a lot braver than I was at ten. At least in Shiroiya you’d have a chance to get to know one another before she moves in with you. And it would be on neutral territory, with a dozen other people around.”

Kankurō cocked his head to one side, considering. “There’s an idea. I haven’t been to Shiroiya just for pleasure in ages. I’d enjoy showing her around, actually.” He smiled slowly in approval. “Yeah – I like it. I’ll ask her, just to be sure, but I think she’ll go for it. If that’s okay with you?”

Gaara nodded, and the now-crackling fire threw glints of copper from his red hair. “Of course. I wanted your thoughts on Fujimori Amai and Terashima anyway, so this works out perfectly. In fact, you could also visit the hospital there, and see whether Shiroiya’s neurologists can turn up anything Kawamura-san missed.”

Kankurō had a piece of fish halfway to his mouth and froze, his stomach plummeting to his feet.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” Gaara answered, swallowing a bit of rice behind his hand, “that you could see a neurologist while we’re in Shiroiya. Assuming,” he added, “that Kumi-chan wants to go.”

Breathing very slowly, Kankurō put his chopsticks down, barely suppressing a sudden urge to throw them. “But _why_ would you say that?”

Sensing something amiss, Temari put her own chopsticks back on the table and sat up a little straighter, suddenly alert. The breeze ruffled her pigtails, but otherwise she waited, unmoving, for the shoe to drop.

“There was a note in your medical file.”

He didn’t speak too quickly. He kept eating. He didn’t fidget or tense his shoulders or lower his eyes. It was a decent attempt at a lie, for Gaara, who was even more artlessly sincere than Temari. And it was so out-of-the ordinary for Gaara to lie at all that he might have fallen for it. But he was definitely lying.

 “No.” Kankurō ground his teeth. “There wasn’t. I didn’t want a civilian fucking around in my head, so I went through the whole damn file to make sure Kawamura hadn’t mentioned it. Gaara – how did you know Kawamura wanted me to see a civilian specialist?”

Gaara gave him one of those blank stares that usually broke his heart. This morning it infuriated him.

“You know already, don’t you?” the Kazekage asked after a moment, his green eyes regretful.

“You knew?” Temari’s voice rose shrilly.

At the same moment, white-knuckled and barely able to spit out the words, Kankurō demanded, “How long?”

The Kazekage sighed. “Since October.”

“Goddammit!”

“I happened to see you go into the hospital, and even from a distance I could see that you weren’t yourself. But when I saw you the next day, you said nothing. So, I went to the hospital to find out – wait, Kankurō –”

He didn’t hear the rest of what Gaara tried to tell him. He didn’t even bother walking back down the stairs but vaulted over the edge of the terrace and opened the front door from the outside to change his shoes.

Then he went to confront Kawamura.


	10. Surreality

The sound of shattering glass broke the quiet hum of activity in Kawamura Mirei’s Saturday clinicals. The genin students had been hard at work in the hospital laboratory, but now everyone paused to locate the source of the clatter. Standing in the middle of the glass shards, holding a now half-empty vial rack, Kumi sighed.

Ban Ryōji immediately left his own samples to pick up a hand broom and dustpan.

“Are you okay?” He crouched beside her and began to sweep under the cabinets for the bits of glass that had skittered furthest from her. “You didn’t –” He didn’t get to finish his question, because Kawamura called to her from across the room.

“Nozara-san, when you’ve finished, come over here, please.” Kawamura-sensei crooked a finger, and Kumi nodded at her briefly before turning away to scowl with frustration. She knelt to gather the largest shards by hand, but Ryōji caught her by the wrist and hauled her to her feet.

“Here, don’t do that, the glass is too fine. You’ll get splinters.” He held out the dustpan and she dropped the few pieces she had picked up into it, pressing her lips together tightly to avoid snapping at him.

“Would be my own fault, for being so clumsy,” she said instead.

“Nah. It was just an accident. And glass is the one thing that is cheap in Suna,” Ryōji pointed out with a grin. “At least the tray didn’t have any samples in it,” he added, still earnestly trying to console her.

She bowed a quick thanks to him for his help before joining her teacher. Normally a good student, today she seemed to be making careless mistakes with everything she touched. The broken vials were at least the third thing she’d screwed up, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock.

The doctor crossed her arms and raised a meaningful brow. Kawamura Mirei was a pretty woman, tall and slim, with skin the color of an autumn moon and smooth dark hair that always looked as if she had just run a comb through it, but it was her demeanor that Kumi envied. Occasionally brusque, though never rude, she exuded an almost masculine energy of square-shouldered self-possession that Kumi hoped one day to imitate.

“Sorry, Kawamura-sensei.” Kumi lowered her head, embarrassed. She was the youngest in her class, and the Senior Medic had gone to some trouble to have her admitted in the first place. Today she was earning poor returns on the investment.

“Did something happen, Kumi-chan?” Kawamura prodded, unsatisfied.

“I got some news last night.”

“Ah.” Kawamura put her hands on her hips. “I thought that must be it. He didn’t waste any time, did he?”

Kumi didn’t answer, and the medic sighed. “Kumi-chan, you know I would have excused you.”

“I know. I just didn’t really want to be alone with my thoughts anymore,” she replied, hoping that would be enough to appease Kawamura’s nurturing instincts. Grief counseling hadn’t done much to alleviate the pain of losing her mother, but she had learned how to deflect the well-meaning questions.

“I see. Well, I’m sympathetic, but I can’t have you miscalculating drug dosages or mislabeling specimens.”

Kumi heaved an inward sigh of relief. She wasn’t going to push. Women were usually predictable – mothers, especially. One or two candid thoughts, and then they would pronounce it a productive conversation, and you could get away with saying you didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Men were less easy to gauge – many seemed relieved to avoid emotional tête-à-têtes, and others – the Kazekage, for example – pressed as if they meant to draw blood.

Kawamura tapped a cheek thoughtfully. “Here,” she said, reaching over Kumi to a stack of papers on the counter. “Why don’t you enter these release reports for me? You’re a good copyist, so it shouldn’t take much concentration.”

“That sounds great.” Data entry was exactly the kind of mind-numbing drudgery she needed – and release reports weren’t for active patients, so even if she did make a mistake, she wouldn’t accidentally kill anyone.

Kawamura took Kumi’s chin in her hand and tilted her face up, eyeing her critically. “You need some sleep, Kumi-chan.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Kumi retorted drily. She clapped a hand over her mouth at Kawamura’s look of affronted surprise. “Sorry, Kawamura-sensei,” she apologized again, with a quick little bow.

By the time she had the reports copied into the computer database, it was almost nine, and Kawamura dismissed the class the moment Kumi slid the last report into its folder. Before she or Kumi could leave, however, Kankurō stepped into the room, waiting impatiently for the students to clear out.

Kumi’s stomach dropped. She was suddenly, irrationally afraid that she had dreamed the entirety of last night’s encounter.

“Mirei…” Kankurō’s face darkened ominously.

“Is this really a conversation you want to have in front of your daughter?” Kawamura asked mildly. It hadn’t been a dream, then.

Kuroisuna no Kankurō really was her father.

“Kumi-chan,” he said shortly, not taking his eyes off the medic, “wait for me on the steps, will you?”

Kumi scrambled to gather her things. As she backed out of the room, her gaze shifting uncertainly between her teacher and the puppeteer glowering at her, Kankurō glanced at her and said more mildly, “It’s alright, kid. Has nothing to do with you, yeah?

“This is between Kawamura-san and me. And apparently,” he spat, “my little brother.”

His brother. The Kazekage. The bloody Kazekage was her uncle.

Kumi left, shutting the door silently behind her, and went outside to sit on the stairs.

Winters in Suna were usually pleasant during the day, but although the sun was bright and quickly warming the sandstone and adobe buildings on the Square, the morning was still too cool for Kumi’s tastes. Her hands stiffened in the cold and ached painfully –a lingering curse from her grandfather. Glancing around, just in case Gohachiro might be nearby, she self-consciously began to massage them, as she had seen older puppeteers do. It helped a little, though it may have been simple frictive warmth that soothed them.

She was chilled through and thoroughly anxious by the time Kankurō emerged from the hospital fifteen minutes later. His face was like a thundercloud, and repressed fury rolled off him in icy waves. For a moment, she felt almost afraid of the strange man in black stalking toward her. Then she noticed his fingers dancing at his side. Hers did the same thing when she was upset, anxious for the comfort of a string, the numbing analgesic of repetition.

She rose instantly from her seat at the top of the hospital steps, and the veteran puppeteer composed his features as he moved to join her. He wore no hood and no paint, and he looked as tired as she felt.

“Sorry about that,” he said, not breaking stride. “Did I make you wait long?”

Kumi shook her head wordlessly and fell into step beside him as he descended the stairs.

Breakfast was uncomfortable; Kankurō was not in the mood to talk, nor, apparently, to eat. He had guided her into a small café and ordered, but although he had downed three cups of black coffee, his miso, rice, and pickles remained untouched. Kumi picked at her rolled egg, remembering the parenteral nutrition bags in his office and wondering whether he _could_ eat if he wanted to. Meanwhile, he stared out the window with a hard look on his face.

“Kankurō-dono…” Kumi ventured, unable to bear the tension any longer.

After a distracted _hmmm_ and a brief glance, a minute furrow appeared between Kankurō’s brows, and his eyes settled on her face.

“What?”

“Is everything okay?”

He relaxed a bit. “I’m fine, kid. Just madder than hell.” He rubbed a rough hand over his unpainted face, equal parts frustrated and weary. “Like I said, it doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

She chewed on her lip as she nodded.

Kankurō sat back in his chair and looked at her with resignation. “Sorry, kid. I know I’m not making this any easier for you.”

“It’s alright,” she replied. “I shouldn’t have pried.”

“You’re not prying,” he said firmly. “You can always ask – and if I happen to ask about something you don’t want to talk about, you can always ask me to back off, too.”

Kumi nodded again, breathing a little easier; this was more like the man she had spoken with the night before. She’d known he had a temper; she scolded herself, picking up her chopsticks again. It wasn’t anything to be nervous about, especially considering that it wasn’t directed at her. Cripes, she had a short fuse herself – she’d even talked back to Kawamura this morning, a teacher she adored.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked aloud.

Even he didn’t want to tell her why he was angry, she would feel better knowing for certain that the bags in his office were only meant to be supplemental nutrition. If he hadn’t wanted to rouse suspicion, he would have just ordered the coffee he was swilling, instead of leaving a whole meal uneaten.

“Not really.” But to her relief, he took up his own chopsticks and made a stab at his rice. They finished their breakfasts in a more companionable silence, and then he threw a few bills on the table and gestured for her to follow him.

He led her onto the Square and into the imposing-looking Records Hall, where the attendant regarded them with open curiosity. Kumi stood quietly by, mimicking Kankurō’s poise while he asked, with complete nonchalance, for a word with someone in Family Services. The attendant disappeared for a moment and returned with a chubby, cheerful young woman, who in turn led them upstairs and into her office in the Family Services department.

Kankurō explained his purpose without a trace of unease, as if he had applied for custodial guardianship of orphaned children a hundred times before. When the lady turned, agape, to stare at the hitherto unknown member of the tiny Kazekage clan, Kumi replied only with a wry smile, although her stomach was in knots.

“I’m sure you can understand that the Kazekage clan would prefer to make this public at our leisure, of course.” Kankurō gave the woman a easy smile that brought a flush into her dimpled cheeks.

“I – I mean, we, of course, we,” she stammered, “always manage the Kazekage clan’s personal records with the strictest confidence.” Kankurō’s smiled warmed in response, and the lady’s eyelashes fluttered rapidly in charmed bemusement.

Kumi bit the inside of her cheek in amusement. He was an attractive man; he knew it, and clearly he wasn’t above using his looks to accomplish his ends.

After that, Kumi didn’t remember much of the ‘bureaucratic bullshit’ they faced in the Hall of Records. It was, as Kankurō had predicted, tedious but uncomplicated, as nothing in her mother’s Final Disposition had mentioned her father.

She did distinctly recall the caseworker assigned to them by the pretty, easily-charmed secretary; he was a fussy, bespectacled man with an unfortunately high-pitched voice, who proved to be extraordinarily efficient. He asked for a second test to confirm the results of the first, also as Kankurō had predicted. Once their blood had been drawn and the medic gone to amplify and compare the new samples, the caseworker walked them through all of the necessary paperwork, initialing Kankurō’s signatures on each meticulously highlighted line. Kumi was not asked to sign anything.

She also remembered the way her stomach dropped when she realized ‘custodial guardianship’ meant moving out of the barracks to live with a man she barely knew. Although he must have anticipated the change in living arrangements, even the stoic Kankurō seemed a bit pale when he passed her a key to his house and told her she could start moving in her things whenever she wanted.

He was far less troubled about money. One of the things that had assured her sleeplessness the night before was the prospect of losing her stipend, which she had religiously budgeted every month for four years. The idea of being monetarily dependent on a stranger galled and frightened her. Kankurō noticed her discomfiture the moment the caseworker mentioned it, however, and he had taken her aside at once to reassure her.

She would receive the same monthly allowance she always had, he promised, though it would come from him rather than the barracks administrator. What she did with it was her business – though, of course, she wouldn’t need to spend it on groceries or household items, or ‘that kind of thing,’ whatever that entailed. It was still a kind of dependence, but she wouldn’t have to clear her purchases with him. It was more than she could have hoped for.

Still, given that ‘that kind of thing’ had always eaten a significant portion of her funds, conscience dictated she suggest a lower amount. He waved her off, unconcerned.

“Had I apprenticed you, you would have needed some additional funds, anyway. For puppetry supplies, if nothing else,” he said with a shrug. Then he smiled crookedly – the first time she had seen him smile all day. “I hear Echo needs a more sensitive microphone.”

Late that afternoon, Kawamura personally delivered a photograph of the gel electrophoresis results. Kumi had not questioned the doctor’s first test, but her stomach performed strange acrobatics when she beheld the unmistakably matched bands of macromolecules, marching neatly across the agar in dark blue dye. With the punctiliously initialed photograph in hand, the caseworker assured them that Kankurō’s appeal for custody would be reviewed as soon as possible and approved by the Adjudicator General within four to six weeks.

It took less than an hour. Unbeknownst to his brother, the Kazekage had already spoken with the Adjudicator General, who signed the guardianship appeal the moment it passed into his hands. All said and done, fewer than twenty-four hours passed between the moment Kankurō recognized Kumi as his daughter and the moment Sunagakure did.

At eight o’clock that evening, the newly minted father and daughter sat side-by-side on a practice field near the Records Hall, eating chuuka-man and custard pudding in the dark. Neither had wanted a midday meal, but while breakfast had been a long while back, nor were they up to the noise and press of a restaurant on Saturday night. Kankurō had asked briefly if she minded convenience fare, and by way of response, she had ducked into the grocery that they happened to be passing at the time.

Kankurō leaned back on his elbows, closed his eyes, and turned his face up to the starry sky.

“I have been through literal wars that were less stressful than today was.” His voice was low and gravelly.

Kumi nodded and lay down herself, studying the constellations above her. She did not share his combat experience, but she appreciated the sentiment. “I could fall asleep right here,” she acknowledged, covering a yawn.

He rolled his head toward her with a rueful look. “Unfortunately, kid, I have one more thing to run by you before you can pass out.”

“Well, hit me while I’m numb,” she answered lightly, yawning again. “I’ll be a nervous wreck tomorrow.”

At his look of concern, she made a small huff of quiet laughter. “I’m joking, Kankurō-dono. I think.”

“Ah. Well, the Kazekage is going to Shiroiya in a few days. He expects to be there for at least a couple of weeks. That’s not public knowledge, yet,” he added seriously, “so keep it to yourself. My sister suggested this morning that you and I go with him, in an unofficial capacity.”

His mouth twisted, and Kumi recalled uncomfortably the puppeteer’s earlier disposition.

“She thinks – and I agree with her – that it will be easier for you and me to get to know one another on neutral ground, where the rumor mills won’t be grinding quite so industriously. At least,” he amended, “not around us.”

Kumi rubbed her eyes, but the idea was intriguing, and she sat up again. “It would also effectively delay my moving in with you,” she noted, conscious of a sudden sense of relief. “For a little while.”

“Well, regardless of whether we go, I signed an agreement to have your things out of the barracks by your birthday,” he reminded her. “That was one of the Adjudicator General’s conditions for approving the appeal so quickly – getting your expenses off the Village accounts for the new fiscal year. And you’re also supposed to have your things out of the old Theatre by tomorrow, you’ll recall. But, yeah. It’s something to consider.”

“It would be nice to have a little more time to wrap my head around everything,” she admitted. She chewed on a lip. “Two weeks in the Capital, though… What about my team?”

“At _least_ two weeks,” Kankurō corrected. “In the meantime, Satoh Yamashita will cover your role in Team Ajibana. Team Kurosaki came back injured from a B-rank a few days ago, but Satoh-kun sustained less severe injuries than his teammates and is ready to be back in the field.”

“I guess the Kazekage has already cleared the way for that transfer, too, huh?” she asked, not thinking.

The black shadow passed over Kankurō’s face again. “That’s your uncle,” he said, with a trace of bitterness. “Always on top of everything.”

“We were supposed to spar today,” she said suddenly, as if she had forgotten. She hadn’t, not for a moment, but a new subject seemed advisable. She glanced regretfully up at Naruki, whose painted face stared up at the stars, seemingly disconsolate. “I was looking forward to it.”

“I was too.” He reached out and ruffled her curls. The small intimacy raised a kaleidoscope of butterflies in her stomach, as it had the previous night. No adult had touched her with anything resembling affection since her mother had died – with concern, certainly, with approbation, on occasion, but she could not recall having been touched only for the sake of a physical connection. Not since that last night she’d had with her mother, snuggled on the sofa eating popped corn and watching television.

Tears stung her eyes. She didn’t know whether they were tears of happiness or sorrow, but either way, she didn’t want Kankurō to see them. He spoke before she could make her excuses, however.

“Let’s do it.”

Kumi turned away and rubbed at her eyes, trying to eliminate the tears from them. “What, now?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yeah. Now. We are on a practice field,” he pointed out, inarguably but not precisely to the point.

“You want to spar now,” she reiterated, “when neither of us has slept for two days.”

He grinned crookedly. “Should make an interesting match-up, yeah?”

She shook her head, although she couldn’t help a smile. “I guess as long as you don’t decapitate me by accident.”

“I’m tired, not blind,” he scoffed. “You’re safe with me.”

Kumi got to her feet and shook out her hands, which had stiffened again in the night air. If it got much colder, they would really start to ache. “Alright. But I’m putting my protest in for a rematch right now. No fair judging my skills when I’m guaranteed to be sloppy.”

“This will be purely recreational,” he assured her, touching one of the ever-present scrolls on his back. At once Karasu sprang to his hands, fixing Kumi with his three-eyed gaze. She stared back, excited despite her fatigue. He was even creepier up close, and a shiver of nervous delight swept up her back, making the hairs on her neck stand on end. Kankurō must have noticed, because his puppet suddenly started chattering loudly; the wooden mouth opening and closing with impossible speed, rattling off a jarring battle cry.

She jumped, to her embarrassment.

Kankurō laughed out loud. “Don’t get psyched out yet, kid. We haven’t even started.”

“Keep laughing,” she retorted, red-faced. “Naruki and I have surprises of our own.”

“Bring it on,” he jibed.

She turned and ran a few dozen meters down the field, raising Naruki before her. The princess bowed gracefully to the crow, but as she raised her head, a long black naginata shot out from her right sleeve. Then she waited, still but for the wind that stirred her hair and her clothes, for Karasu to attack.

The puppet wasted no time, immediately firing off smoke bombs to obscure Kumi’s vision as he plunged forward. Kumi released Naruki’s giant fan from her left sleeve and swept the smoke away in time to block Karasu with the naginata – he had a hand raised to slap her cheek, an insolent insult to start the match. Naruki jabbed at him, and he withdrew to a safer distance.

“You’re not even trying,” Kumi shouted from downfield. Kankurō grinned in reply, and, alerted by an uncomfortable wind at her back, Kumi neatly sidestepped her puppet, trading places with her so that Karasu’s detached arm, with its hidden blade extended, fell harmlessly on Naruki’s fan, now doubling as a shield. Kumi grinned back at Kankurō, exuberant.

“That’s more like it,” she approved, “but two can play that game!”

To her immense gratification, he let loose with an undignified yelp as he realized he wasn’t the only one to have taken advantage of the smoke. One of Kumi’s murder had been waiting in the darkness beyond him for the proper moment; he narrowly missed a swipe by one viciously sharpened wing.

The highly stylized crow puppet wasn’t much more than a pair of vaguely wing-shaped, blackened knives, connected by a narrow body that ended on one side in an extendable, conical beak for head-on attacks, and on the other in a tail of slender, double-edged “feathers,” which could be ejected in a deadly spray of blades. She flipped the crow and released them now, though only two of the feathers landed anywhere near Kankurō.

She didn’t have long to regret her poor aim; Karasu bore down on her with lightning speed. Leaving the first of her murder to harry Kankurō, she turned her attention on his puppet, which had regained its cast-off arm. Multiple blades flipped out from its belly as it barreled toward her. Naruki’s naginata slashed down on them from above, briefly disrupting their aim, but Karasu quickly rebalanced. Kumi took off toward Kankurō in a dead sprint, as if running away from Karasu’s weapons. Darting through a particularly shadowy section of the field, she unleashed two more crows under the night’s cover. These remained low to the ground to circle around behind the puppet master as she turned to face his favorite combat puppet and to draw Naruki before her, with her fan retracted and her naginata drawn. Karasu extended the long knives hidden in all four of his arms, and the two puppets fell to fighting like fiends, with the ring of their steel echoing through the field.

That was her favorite part of the fight, even though it ultimately led to her defeat. In a real sparring match, Kankurō would have avoided such a direct confrontation – Karasu’s multi-jointed arms not being suited the sort of swordplay at which Naruki’s far more rigid naginata excelled – but it wasn’t real. And fighting with toy swords was one of those things you were supposed to do with your father. And there were so many things they should have done together and hadn’t.

These weren’t toys, but Kumi and Kankurō enjoyed them no less for their deadly sharpness. While parrying Karasu’s knives, Kumi also maneuvered three of her crows in and around Kankurō’s legs, forcing him to counter not only Naruki’s naginata with Karasu, but also to keep out of the path of the princess’s avian entourage. But if she was distracting him, so too her multiple puppets were distracting her, and for just a moment too long, she forgot that Karasu had an entourage of his own.

Kuroari enveloped her in an instant, the segments of his barrel-shaped belly clamping around her like monstrous jaws.

She shrieked, and immediately Kankurō shouted for her, his swift footfalls drumming on the earth so rapidly she could barely distinguish one from the next.

“Kid – Kumi-chan! Are you okay?” He threw open Kuroari’s trap. The look of abject terror on the puppet master’s face was so incongruous with his usual demeanor that Kumi couldn’t help herself. She dissolved into a fit of laughter, snorting and gasping for air.

Kankurō’s expression grew sour, and she seized up with merriment, jerking so forcefully that she smacked the back of her head into Kuroari’s hardwood casing. Kankurō resolutely quashed the quiver of mirth that twitched at his mouth, and that made her laugh all the harder. She began to choke, unable to breathe.

“Are you hysterical?” Kankurō asked flatly, raising his hand.

“No.” She sucked in a breath, and he lowered his hand, still eyeing her suspiciously, as if she might spontaneously explode. Her laughter subsided into fitful giggles, and she wiped tears from her cheeks, smiling broadly up at her father, who was still manfully pretending to be unamused.

 “I think I’m _happy_.”


	11. A Bloody Earthquake

When Kankurō returned home that night, Gaara had prudently opted not to be there. Temari was, however, and she had been busy. A row of cardboard boxes lined the wall of his living room, each bearing a neat label in Temari’s solid, unfeminine hand: _Old clothes, Spare parts, Books, Masks, Papers._

Hearing the door open, Temari emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “I cleared out that back room,” she said with a nod at the boxes, “but I wasn’t sure where you wanted all this stuff. I thought…” She shrugged. “Well, Kumi-chan is going to need a bedroom, eventually.”

“Not ‘eventually,’” he answered, stooping to remove his shoes, trying to ignore the way his body protested. “Immediately.”

Temari’s lips parted in a small _O_ of surprise.

“Gaara pulled some strings to force the paperwork through,” he explained dully, assuming his slippers. “According to the Hall of Records and the Adjudicator General, I am Kumi-chan’s lawful guardian. She’s supposed to be out of the barracks by the twenty-first.”

“And that’s all there is to it?” she asked, stunned.

He dropped onto the sofa with a weary groan, and, setting his elbows on his knees, he leaned forward to rest his forehead on his laced fingers. “Apparently.”

“Bloody hell,” she murmured, joining him on the sofa. “That was fast. Are you okay?”

“Fine. Tired.”

“Kankurō,” she chided reproachfully, shaking her head.

He flung himself back into the sofa cushions with an oath. “I’m used to responsibility, Temari. But this is, it’s so…”

He cursed, frustrated with his inability to define the crushing obligation that had been thrust upon him. Duty had never before seemed so daunting.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It is.”

“How the hell do you do it?”

The question was largely rhetorical, but true to form, Temari answered it anyway.

“When Shikamaru and I become parents,” she answered, her gaze retreating into memory, “just keeping a baby alive was so overwhelming that there was no time, no energy left to consider the enormity of it. There was an endless onslaught of distracting fluids and firsts and fevers until he was about five or six years old, and by then…”

A fond smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “By then, it was as if he had always been there. The world shifted into place around him while I was too dazed by late night feedings and toilet training to notice.”

Her slender fingers scrabbled lightly on his back in a sympathetic gesture. “You didn’t have the mercy of a thousand tiny adjustments over months and years. You got a bloody earthquake.”

He nodded bitterly.

“And I got the better end of the fucking bargain.” He grimaced, thinking of Kumi’s pale face and stiff shoulders while their caseworker explained the particulars of Kankurō’s custody papers.

“Temi, you should have seen her face when it really hit her. This kid doesn’t even know me. Suddenly she’s reliant on me for everything – food, clothes, a roof over her head. Shikadai never –”

His voice abandoned him, and he shook his head irritably, scrambling for his composure.

“Depending on you was never an option for him,” he went on, a bit surprised that his sister had permitted him to finish the thought without interrupting. “He never had to question whether or not he could trust you or wonder if you would reject him if he fucked up somehow or if you even gave a damn about him.”

“But you _do_ give a damn,” she pointed out reasonably, “and you’re _not_ going to reject her. Kumi-chan will learn to trust you.” Temari gently nudged his knee with her own.

“You have her respect. Trust is a pretty natural next step from there. You’ve got the discipline to be consistent with her and the integrity to do what you say you will. Believe me; I’ve worked with enough kids to know that credibility goes a long way toward trust. A lot further than affection, frankly.”

He clicked his tongue with a dark scowl and pointed a finger at her. “That. That, I’m not so good at.”

She shoved his finger away. “Oh, bah. We’re none of us naturally affectionate people. We were just too isolated as kids – Gaara, especially, but all of us, to an extent. He and I manage, though, and when you get right down to it, we’re both less socially adept than you are. You’ll learn, too. Probably faster than we did.”

She mussed his hair and gave him her best sister-smile.

“You’ve got more going for you than you realize, Otouto. Don’t be a fatalist.” Wrinkling her nose and withdrawing her hand as if she’d touched something unpleasant, she added, “You’re gross, incidentally. Go take a shower, and then come back and have a beer with me. I want to hear more about my niece.”

Kankurō stood up and eyed her suspiciously. “Stop being so nice, yeah? I’m bloody well confused enough as it is.”

She reached up to slap his leg. “Go,” she ordered, pointing imperiously to the stairwell.

Upstairs, as he soaped off the sweat of the day, he wondered whether he was being a fatalist, after all. He wasn’t, ordinarily. Skeptical, always; he questioned everything, but most of the time he had no trouble acknowledging natural advantages or good fortune. Was he overlooking them now, too cowed by an unfamiliar role to see what ought to be clear?

_I think I’m happy._

A reluctant smile crossed his face. It had scared the shit out of him at the time, realizing he had been personally and involuntarily responsible for Kumi’s face-splitting grin and breathless laughter. It was one thing to see to her physical needs, to protect her from Nobu, even to nurture her creative talents and technical abilities, but making her happy was something else altogether. Surely that required a skill set he hadn’t developed, assuming he possessed it at all.

But, possibly he _was_ overthinking it. He _had_ made her happy, entirely by accident. It required no machinations, no plans, nor any alteration of his usual gruff manner. He and Kumi had a natural rapport that had been clear long before Kawamura’s DNA comparison identified a more concrete bond between them. Their mutual passion for puppetry was also an advantage he shouldn’t overlook, because he would never want for conversation or an excuse to spend time with the little girl. There would always draftsmanship and crafting techniques, combat practice, and new ideas to occupy them.

And Temari had noted a solid point in his favor: if he wasn’t a demonstrative individual, still he read people well, intuitively able to perceive their needs, desires, and fears. He saw to Gaara’s comfort and happiness without even thinking about it, and the Kazekage was far more challenging to read than Kumi. If picking up on her needs was no more difficult than looking out for Gaara, he might possibly manage without much difficulty.

Scowling at the shower floor, he pushed thoughts of his brother irritably aside. By the time the meter shut off the showerhead, he felt calmer, persuaded that what he had achieved by accident could likely be reproduced with a bit of application. He would focus on earning Kumi’s trust and getting to know her tastes and habits, small feats that he was confident he could accomplish. If Kumi needed the sort of tenderness he’d occasionally witnessed between his brothers and their sons – and she deserved to have it, whether she needed it or not – then he’d pick up the skills he lacked somewhere along the way.

He went to dress and discovered that he badly needed to do laundry. His only clean lounge pants were embarrassingly oversized. Rather than risk Temari’s comments on his weight loss, he opted for the expedient of an old but barely-worn yukata. He surveyed himself briefly in the mirror, as he knotted a simple obi around it. The effect wasn’t bad. The loose fabric concealed a good deal more than a tee and pants would have done. It might behoove him to purchase several more, he mused: it was comfortable, he was off-duty anyhow, and it was a relief, for a change, not to worry about the size of the waist.

Besides, it would give him an excuse to take Kumi clothes shopping. He had never seen her wear anything but the simple black keikogi she had worn when she brought Little Bird to him, and he doubted that she had much else.

When he came back downstairs, carrying his dirty laundry, he paused to glance in the spare bedroom where Temari had been at work. It was almost completely empty; his sister had gone to some lengths to make herself useful while he dealt with paperwork in the Records Hall. Aside from sorting through the miscellanies that had piled up in the unused room over the years, she had scrubbed the walls and floor until they shone, and only some neatly folded bed linens remained in what would soon be Kumi’s bedroom.

It was a fair-sized room, easily twice as big as her dorm in the genin barracks, which he had seen for the first time that night when he walked her home. It had been even less inviting than his empty guest room, but Kumi had only chuckled at his chagrinned expression.

“It’s really not that bad,” she had assured him. “Most of us manage to make it feel a lot homier. I just never wanted to spend the money on posters or curtains. Besides,” she added, “I’m usually in the workshop.”

Other than a shrine she had cobbled together for her mother’s spirit, the tiny room might have been a prison cell. There was a rickety table and a chair, an old chest, and a plain white futon folded in the corner. The walls were completely bare, excepting only the built-in bookshelf, on which her Academy texts and medical books rested, and some cabinets which presumably hid her toiletries.

Although Kumi had secreted a respectable array of puppetry tools, materials, and supplies in her makeshift studio, her other possessions were startlingly minimal. She had chosen drills over hairdryers, microphones over music albums, and varnish over makeup. Gohachiro had given her cash on occasion, Kankurō recalled, viewing the empty room with hallow feeling in his stomach, but often he simply gave her sweets, or hair accessories, or art supplies.

With a prescience that forced Kankurō once again to rethink his assumptions concerning the boy, Gohachiro made Kumi gifts of small indulgences he had known she wouldn’t buy for herself. It stung that her one-time tormentor should know her so well. The fact that he had felt obliged to support her materially stung even more fiercely.

The current Daimyo held his nation’s shinobi in much higher regard than his predecessors had. Consequently, he kept a much looser hand on the purse strings. With fair pay restored, and Terashima committed to hiring Suna nin whenever possible, the Village had recovered much of its former prosperity. While no one in Suna was precisely wealthy, rank had its privileges and hazards their remunerations, and both ensured Kankurō had more than he needed.

His daughter never should have wanted for anything.

He shook his head darkly and went to do his laundry.

Temari was watching him as he came down the hall. She had changed into nightwear and was curled up on his sofa, looking entirely harmless and mellow with a big bowl of buttered popcorn in her lap and a pair of his favorite brews in her hands. It was a coldly premeditated move, but it touched him that she had gone to the effort. Harmless and mellow were as foreign to sister’s hardnosed personality as they were to his own.

So, when she held out one of the beers and wordlessly patted the seat beside her, he allowed himself to be baited and joined her.

She handed him a beer, narrowing her eyes at him thoughtfully, revealing little furrows between them and creases at the corners which had not been there only a few years ago.

“Feeling better?” she asked mildly.

He pulled a face. “I was. Then I realized that, on top of packing, and getting Kumi-chan moved out of the barracks, and reviewing some reports for the Theater, and talking to Ryotsu about security, I also need to get some furniture for that room, or Kumi-chan’s welcome is going to be pretty fucking cold.” He sank into the cushions wearily.

“I can take care of that tomorrow,” Temari offered, but he shook his head.

“Nah. I appreciate the offer, but I’d rather she pick it out herself.” He squinted at her suspiciously. “What?” he demanded. “You’ve got your shit-how-do-I-say-this-tactfully face on.”

Her mouth twitched with amusement at this description of her expression.

“Well, you did say she was a little uncomfortable with the idea of being financially dependent.” At his fervent nod, she asked patiently, “Don’t you think participating in such a big purchase might be awkward for her?”

He stared at her. Then he put his face in his hands with a groan.

“Sorry.” Temari shrugged unapologetically. She poked him in the side. “Relax. If you think it’s important, I’m sure we can figure something out.”

He sat upright but fumbled with the words for a long minute. “I just want her to feel at home,” he said finally, unwilling to describe her cheerless room in the barracks.

Temari munched on a few more handfuls of popcorn as she considered. “She’s artistic, isn’t she? Maybe we just pick up some unfinished pieces and let her paint them or stain them however she likes. She wouldn’t have to deal with the money side of it, but it would still be personal. And then she can still pick out any smaller accents for herself.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s… actually, that’s a good idea, Temari.”

“It happens occasionally.” She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway. “Do you want me to handle it?”

“Please.”

She nodded, stretched, and handed him another beer to open for her. Taking a long pull off of it, she leaned back expansively against the arm of the sofa and said, “Now. Tell me everything.”

Possibly it was the beer – he hadn’t eaten much and didn’t have quite the stomach for it that he used to, anyway – but he and Temari talked well into the night. Starting from the beginning, he told her about his first meeting with Kumi, how he first began to suspect they might be connected, and what he had uncovered in the Records Hall about her birthdate and blood type. He explained how he had used the apprenticeship contract and Kawamura’s reluctant assistance to find the truth.

And then he told her everything else. The embarrassing scene in his office, when he had been forced to submit to the little puppeteer’s medical inclinations. The box of toxins he had gifted her in her picturesque deathtrap of a workshop. Her snub of Nozara Nobu, and the old man’s cruel riposte. Their sparring match, and how his heart leapt into his mouth when Kumi had screamed, when he thought for one terrible moment that he had carelessly injured her.

The admission that he had thumped the little genin for her smart mouth drew a surprised snort of laughter, and she exclaimed in horror when he related Kumi’s ruthlessly calculated decision to allow Gohachiro to break her hands. For the most part, though, his sister simply listened. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed to talk about it until the popcorn was gone, and the clock on his wall had long since announced a new day had begun.

He had known she was waiting for something, but she still managed to take him off-guard.

Kankurō picked up the empty beer bottles – there were four of them now, and he’d only had the one – and went to put them in the recycling bin. Temari rose and followed him into the kitchen, and as soon as he’d dropped the bottles into the plastic tub, she moved suddenly behind him and wrapped her arms around his middle.

“Temari…”

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” she said lowly, “and gods know I’m doing my best not to make it more difficult. But you –!”

She tangled her fingers in the folds of his yukata, clinging to him even more fiercely.

“You are the _only_ one I never had worry about, dumbass.”

Her breath caught in her throat, and he turned around to enfold her in a proper embrace.

“You don’t _need_ to worry about me, dumbass,” he said firmly. “Got it? I take care of myself, yeah?”

She laughed suddenly, a choked, unhappy sound. “I take care of _me_ ,” she corrected with a sniffle, resting her cheek on his shoulder. An uncomfortable wetness soaked through his shirt where her tear-streaked face pressed against it.

Unwilling to argue the case for a reflexive pronoun, he sighed and waited for her to have her say.

“My men,” she said after a long moment, in a voice rough with emotion, “they’re all smart. They’re all powerful. But they …their feelings get the better of their judgement, sometimes. Naruto’s fault, I think.”

Her arms tightened around him and her breath caught in an angry sob. “Except you. You’re like _me_ , damn you. A pragmatist. You wear that harum-scarum Corpsman persona like a second skin, but you don’t fool me, not for a second.” Her words tumbled out, quick and fierce and raw.

“Harum-scarum?” he asked, looking down at her in amusement. She didn’t look up, and his good humor faded.

“Everything is a calculated decision with you,” she said bitterly. “Do you not understand how I count on that? I _trusted_ you, you idiot – trusted you to be smart, to be practical, to take care of things. How could you not _fucking_ tell me, Kankurō?”

The betrayal in her voice roused, at last, a small sense of guilt. Irritating Temari was an engaging pastime – angering her was playing with fire, dangerous but entertaining. Hurting her was detestable, and far more dangerous than pissing her off.

Discretion being the better part of valor, at least when Temari was drunk, he patted her back and rested his cheek on the top of her head, noting a few stray silvery threads woven through her blonde hair. He touched one, thinking ruefully that he was probably responsible for at least a couple of them.

“I did mean to tell you once I had a diagnosis,” he admitted, smoothing her hair back down.

She jerked in his arms angrily, ready to fight, but he held firm and spoke quickly.

“I didn’t want to make a big deal of headaches, yeah? But it dragged on and on. The pain got worse. The nausea hit me sooner and lasted longer, and after a while I just didn’t have an appetite at all. And I got tired, Temari. I couldn’t cope with being sick and with you two being worried about me, too.”

“I _can’t_ ,” he corrected, with a self-derisive scoff. “I don’t have the energy. I’d like to tell you to leave me alone and fuck off, and I can’t do that either, because then we’ll fight, and I’m too goddamned tired to argue with you.”

Temari had been standing rigidly in his arms, but with this confession, she hugged him tightly, clinging to him like she thought he might disappear if she let go. They stood there in the darkened kitchen for a long while, not saying anything. He didn’t have much comfort to give her, but he was willing to stand there and hold her as long as she wanted to be held.

“Damn you,” she said finally, sniffling. “I was mostly angry, before. Now you’ve really got me scared.”

“Sorry.”

Stepping back away from him, she wiped at her eyes, no longer crying. “Kankurō…” She fixed him with a serious, candid green stare. “I know you’re angry with Gaara, but please go see the neurologist, anyway.”

He scowled and turned away from her.

Temari’s hand, slim and long-fingered like his own, like Kumi’s, like their mother’s, came from behind to rest on his shoulder. “Please, Otouto. If you won’t do it for me or Gaara, you’ve got a child you have to think of –”

And that was absolutely all he could take. He shrugged off her hand with a jerk and crossed the room quickly to the stairwell. Temari didn’t follow him, and he didn’t look back.


	12. Living Underneath the Underneath

The possibilities that had seemed so amorphous and unreal the day before had taken on a tantalizing shape, but Kumi was too weary to be enticed by anything but slumber. She slept well and dreamlessly and woke early the next morning, eager to take on the day. After rushing through her morning ablutions, however, she found herself staring thoughtfully into the mirror hanging in the barracks showers, watching her dripping curls spring back into shape.

When she had been small, her mother put a cream in her hair after she bathed, to keep her curls from drying out in the arid desert heat. Kumi had smoothing cream, but it was expensive, and she treated it like liquid gold. She only used it on those rare occasions she needed to look presentable. Kankurō had told her not to worry about money, though, so she ran back to her room from the showers, clad only in a towel, to pick up the precious bottle of unscented hair balm.

Squeezing a decadent dollop of yellow cream into her palms, as her mother used to do, she worked it carefully into her hair. Then, after a deep breath and a moment’s hesitation, she gathered up the damp ringlets and began to twist them into a loose braid down the side of her face, securing it with one of the colorful hairbands Gohachiro had given her. Like most of his gifts, the elastic bands had a hidden meaning; he had carefully opened the package and rearranged the colors before handing it off.

It had been a long time since she’d worn her hair braided outside the barracks. Ajibana had insisted on it, for her genin portraits and promotion ceremony; her mother had plaited her hair religiously as a small child, because for her new sensei, it had been a way to honor and remember a cherished teammate. Kumi had yielded, because it was easier than explaining why she tried so hard not to be cute. Sometimes she thought that was why he insisted on the puppeteer’s hood – if she would only braid her hair, as he frequently suggested she should, he might have let her leave it off.

Today, looking cute felt exciting, in a nervous kind of way.

Bowing politely to the barracks admin a few minutes later – thankfully it happened to be one of the two who seemed to like her – she asked whether there might be any cardboard boxes in the supply room or the kitchen pantry that she could have. He obliged her, and forty-five minutes later, everything in her dorm was packed up into one of them: clothes, books, toiletries, anything that wasn’t going with her to Shiroiya. Kankurō hadn’t known exactly when they would depart, but he expected it would be within two or three days.

She slipped out of the barracks carrying the other boxes, avoiding people on the street and trying to look purposeful. Only twice had anyone caught her near the old Theatre, but the subsequent tongue-lashings made her leery of observant strangers. No one paid her any mind, though, and she moved unnoticed into the alleyways behind the shops that catered to the Puppeteer Corps.

Making her way toward rear entrance of the crumbling old Theatre, Kumi brushed off the inevitable shiver that crept up her back, every time she came into this alleyway.

He wasn’t here, she told herself sternly. He was away, somewhere, like always; if he had been in the Village, she would know. Gohachiro always knew, and he always told her. Even so, she sighed in relief when she closed the heavy door behind her, grateful for the thick, gnarled wood that stood between her and her memories.

It was still cool inside. She frequently missed curfew because she had avoided the workshop during the warmer hours; her little space of privacy was windowless and stifling during the summers, only bearable at night. During the winter, it rarely topped twenty-eight degrees inside the workshop, and the chill desert nights sometimes brought the temperature down to four or five. This morning, it was about ten.

Kumi packed quickly, shivering and rubbing occasionally at her aching hands, resisting the distraction of old projects.

While organizing her loose papers and sketchbooks, a massive cockroach skittered out into the light, sending her shrieking into the hallway until she was convinced it had abandoned her workshop for a quieter haunt. Why the shiny brown insect should frighten her more than the monstrous trapdoor spiders she had caught and observed for so many months was peculiar – but it did.

When Kankurō texted her around nine o’clock to ask if she needed any help packing, she asked him to come, although there was little for him to do. She wanted to see him again, and she reasoned that if he hadn’t wanted to see her, he wouldn’t have volunteered his time. And he probably wasn’t scared of cockroaches.

When the puppeteer slipped into the dusty workshop a half hour later, she gave him a curious look, pausing mid-stoop over a big plastic tub half-filled with tools from her desk and pegboard. Unpainted again today, he had traded his usual black tunic and trousers for a charcoal grey yukata with thin, vertical black stripes. The direction of the stripes reversed at the hems, forming a pleasing perpendicular contrast, and he had tied the obi low around his hips with a simple, solid black knot. It wasn’t at all unflattering, but even casual kimonos were unusual in Kaze no Kuni. It took a certain gravitas to pull one off without looking pretentious. Kankurō’s aloof coolness sufficed, though, and Kumi decided that she liked the new look.

“I like the kimono,” she offered.

“I like the braid,” he responded promptly, with an indicative nod.

Her nose turned pink, and she tugged at the plaited tail, feeling a bit self-conscious. “Not too fussy?”

He shook his head. “Not too old man?” he countered, looking down at himself critically.

Kumi tilted her head to one side, playfully appraising. Then she also shook her head, smiling. “No. It’s just different, that’s all. I’d never even seen you without paint before yesterday.”

“Well, as of this past Friday I’m no longer on active duty. Paint and uniforms seemed like a lot of hassle for nothing.”

“You’re benched?” she blurted, too astonished to be polite.

Kankurō’s thin black brows were sharply arched, like her own. One of them made a quizzical jump. “Are you surprised to learn that I’m not exactly in fighting trim these days?” he asked drily.

Recalling the concealed port in his chest, she bit her lip. “Oh.”

Kankurō made a dismissive grunt. “I’m not thrilled about it, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected.”

He crossed the room to join her and dropped into her desk chair with a stifled groan. With a rueful look at her, he asked, “I guess you’d like that explanation I promised you?”

She answered by putting down the tools in her hands and hoisting herself up on the desktop in front of him.

He gave her a tired half-smile. Then, rubbing at his shoulder and making pained grimaces from time to time, he told her about his chronic headaches and the severe nausea that accompanied them. Kumi listened attentively, gnawing on her lip as he spoke. Several of the possible diagnoses that came to mind were devastating illnesses, but Kawamura would have already eliminated the obvious. Faith in the senior medic’s skill helped to ease her worry. A little.

Her first question made the puppet master blink in surprise.

“Not much,” he replied thoughtfully. “If I remember my damn meds in time, the migraine might be a little shorter than it would have been. Possibly a little less painful. The only thing that really helps is being unconscious,” he admitted with a rueful look, probably recalling the night in his office.

“Does anything make it worse?”

He snorted. “Besides breathing? Noise. Light. Being upright.”

She pressed a bit, and although he answered her first couple of questions, he grew irritated in short order. Eventually he waved a surrendering hand at her and told her she could thumb through his medical file if she was that curious.

“It seems to be available for anyone else who wants to see it,” he added with a caustic scowl.

Kumi wondered whether this remark had anything to do with his black mood the previous morning, but she wasn’t quite brave enough to ask. Instead, she cast about for a distraction. Kankurō found one first, and his face cleared suddenly as he reached behind her.

“This is a Widow, yeah?”

A shiny and splay-legged black spider puppet had been sitting on her desk, waiting to be packed up; Kankurō picked it up and pushed a leg aside to display the telltale poison bulb behind the pedipalps.

Kumi smiled, please that he had recognized it from her sketches. “Well, once upon a time, she was.”

Slipping a hand into her pocket, she withdrew a smaller, sleeker version, no bigger than the tip of her thumb. Like Little Bird or her Spyders, it was as true-to-life as she could make it.

“This is Venom,” she said, with a note of pride in her voice.

Little Bird was by far the most complex puppet she had ever designed, but Venom was the deadliest. The only fully black spider in her collection, Venom was her trump card, to be played only on Ajibana’s orders or in the event of his incapacitation in battle. The tiny puppet carried enough stippled sidewinder venom to fell a hundred kilogram man in under four minutes.

The puppet master whistled lowly and set the prototype down, taking her current model from her. With deft and careful hands, he turned the little puppet over to examine her underbelly and the tiny capsules that fed into her fangs, serving as poison glands. The poison bulbs were very small, and as animal toxins tended to be more powerful by volume than botanical combat poisons, Kumi usually armed Venom with one of the viperid venoms to which she had a very rare resistance - such as the stippled sidewinder.

Kankurō recalled correctly that Venom was unique and asked about the toxins she used in her other Widows (unlawfully concentrated gemweed, which Ajibana pretended not to know about). She pulled a brown Widow from her pouch and he inspected it carefully for a few minutes before asking again to see Echo or Effigy, and a Trapper, if she had one handy.

She did, of course. Gohachiro had three pairs of her Spyders, but her originals, Echo and Effigy, were always with her. Other than her surveillance puppets, she also carried Venom, several brown Widows, and at least one Trapper at all times. The newly completed Boom Bug would round out her standard arsenal.

Kankurō rose briefly, pulled out her desk chair and turned it around to sit in it backwards, like a teenager. Then he spread her puppets out on her desk in order to observe them side-by-side.

“May I?” he asked, a crooked smile creasing his face. Even a jounin of his ability and rank would never use another puppeteer’s creations without permission.

Kumi grinned and nodded.

Within minutes he had three puppets chasing one another around the desk, eyes narrowed into black slits, concentrating. His technique was impeccable – he had no trouble adjusting his motions to the tiny articulation points - but he lacked her familiarity with live arachnids. His animated spiders were clearly fakes, moving with single-minded purpose, ignoring hazards and obstacles real animals would have investigated or navigated around.

He shook his head with wonder.

“You’ve got a real gift here, kid,” he told her, when he had finished amusing himself. “Those tiny motions are a bitch – a lot of chuunin couldn’t handle them. Or not more than one, anyway…?” He raised a brow at her and she returned his smirk, manipulating the same three spiders he had used with a far more naturalistic movement.

“Three the best you can do?”

Frowning, she replied, “Well, if I want to keep them lifelike, yeah. I _can_ move four at a time.”

“I’m not criticizing, kid,” he assured her, “just trying to figure out where you are developmentally.”

“Oh.” She relaxed, mollified. “Well, normally I’d have Naruki out, too. I can’t manage more than one of these guys if I’m also fighting with her. Naruki, two crows, and one spider are about all I can handle with consistent precision. But I shouldn’t need more than one of them at a time. The Trappers burrow, leave their explosive traps, and then return, the Widows more or less get thrown onto an opponent pretty quickly, and I wouldn’t use the Spyders in combat.”

“These guys?” He toyed with the curved, barbed tail of her Boom Bug. “What kind of poison would you use in the tail?”

“Not poison. A stable liquid solution of sodium and potassium.”

“Sodium…?” The dark eyes widened in shock. “Shit!”

Kumi smiled demurely. Alkali metals, such as sodium and potassium, reacted powerfully with water. Her Boom Bugs injected those explosive materials directly into a living target– or would, the first time the necessity arose – where they would react with the water molecules beneath the victim’s skin.

“Have you tested that?” he demanded, eyes still bulging from his skull.

“Of course. Not on a person, though. I used a freshly butchered pig carcass.”

“And?” He waved impatiently for her to continue.

“And it’s less impressively gory than you’d think.” Pursing her lips, she explained, “It didn’t even break the skin in most places. Destroyed the muscle tissue, though, and fractured the bone. It would be lethal if you got the insertion point close enough to a major artery or the abdominal cavity. It’s really meant to cripple, though. This is a burrowing-type scorpion that would emerge near the target’s leg.”

He stared at her in apparent horror for a moment. Then he began to laugh.

“Well, shit!” He picked up Venom and the Boom Bug, surprised, but apparently not displeased. “I take it you like your victories quick and bloody.”

“I don’t have the chakra or the stamina to keep Naruki and her murder up indefinitely,” she replied bluntly. “Seichi-kun is a close-range fighter, and Ajibana-sensei and Hachi-kun are both heavy genjutsu users. We aren’t suited to prolonged encounters. So, the longer a skirmish drags on, the more likely it is that one of us gets hurt.”

Smiling faintly, she added, “One of Ajibana-sensei’s first lessons: Mercy is a luxury for the powerful. You’re still weak, so don’t hold back and don’t hesitate.”

Kankurō gave her a speculative look, but after a moment, nodded his agreement.

Holding out the two lethal puppets in his hand, he mused, “Why the fascination with arachnids?”

“It’s partly Mom’s fault,” she replied. “Her combat puppet was multi-limbed. My first toy puppet was a four-legged spider, and Mom added more legs to it and made it progressively smaller as I got bigger. It’s the oldest form I know, so I use it a lot.”

Kumi picked up the clunky Widow prototype, cradling it in her hands. It hadn’t occurred to her until just now that the father she’d known less than a week knew more about her puppetry than the mother who had inspired it. She felt vaguely guilty about that for some reason.

“And, I guess…” She hesitated for a moment, but he simply raised a brow and waited for her to continue.

“I guess it’s also that my mom believed that the best puppets were built from the strongest parts of their puppeteers,” Kumi explained, resolutely closing a mental door on an image of her mother’s combat puppet, Jorōgumo. “It could be rage, or pain, or desire, or even vision – but something personal. Something powerful enough to be weaponized and turned against an enemy.”

“Is that so?”

Kankurō pushed himself up from the chair, the soft cotton of his kimono rustling as he stood. Joining Kumi on the desk, not quite sitting, but resting against the edge beside her, he proffered the Widow still in his hand.

“Then tell me, Kumi-chan,” he continued, his voice quiet and contemplative, “what was it inside _you_ that was powerful enough to weaponize?”

He drew back a little in surprise at her small snort of laughter and reluctant smile that twitched at her lips.

From the tea tin of pencils on her desk, she pulled out a glittery purple pencil. There was a scrap of paper wound about it; she slipped off the curled note and handed it to the puppeteer.

As he mouthed the words, Kankurō’s eyes narrowed briefly with suspicion, or possibly anger, though he quickly recovered himself.

_Few can see underneath the underneath. Fewer can live there. When you are promoted to chuunin, ask for Moon Rabbit at ANBU headquarters._

“Moon Rabbit, huh?” he asked. “Where did you get this?”

His voice did not betray the brief upset that had shown in his eyes, but when she reached out to retrieve the note, he made no move to return it to her.

Wary, she withdrew her hand and quickly related the story.

A masked ANBU agent had given a guest lecture at the Academy a few months before Kumi’s genin promotion. She told the class that she had been in the school for a while, unconcealed and undisguised, watching, observing, and picking up on the students’ crushes and secrets and little dramas. After embarrassing several kids by relating some of the more interesting things she had discovered, demonstrating how close she had been to them, she asked whether anyone could guess who she was. No one answered.

 _You don’t know_ , she’d told them, _because I didn’t have crushes and secrets and little dramas. I didn’t interact; I didn’t make impressions. I was just part of the scenery around you._

Kumi had often toyed with her Spyders during class. They were meant to be hidden, after all, and if she could conceal two five-centimeter spiders from a class full of eleven-year-old girls, she figured she had a decent shot at planting them just about anywhere. On that particular day, however, she found that she was unable to retrieve Echo, and had remained in the class to search for her missing puppet.

As soon as she was alone, the ANBU agent reappeared.

Although Kumi could not recall having seen the masked woman even approach Echo’s hiding place, Moon Rabbit returned the spider to her along with a question:

_Do you know who I am?_

She had answered, reluctantly; she suspected Moon Rabbit had been the aide during their taijutsu lessons but hadn’t ventured that opinion during class. The agent raised her mask just long enough to confirm Kumi’s guess, handed her the pencil with its cryptic note, and disappeared with a smoke bomb.

“She was bland,” she explained with a shrug, when Kankurō raised his brow, requesting exposition. “Uninteresting. Unremarkable. Unnoticeable. You couldn’t have called her kind or stern or loud or friendly or impressive or even pretty – she was, actually, but it a way that it barely registered. You wouldn’t be able to remember her eye color or hair style. She was just there, a face in the crowd. And I guess I noticed her, because I’d spent most of the last three years trying to be just like her.”

She snorted and waggled the pencil. “Apparently I didn’t do it very well, because Moon Rabbit made it a point to show me she knew I liked the color purple.”

He didn’t smile.

“Why would you want to be a face in the crowd, Kumi-chan?”

Although she could detect no trace of anything but mild interest in his voice, the air prickled at her skin and she felt suddenly on edge. She shrugged noncommittally.

“I guess because, after Mom died, people only noticed me when they were fulfilling one of those ‘uncomfortable responsibilities’ you once mentioned. You know: Get milk. Sharpen kunai. Wash the dog,” she recited in a flip tone, before adding cynically, “Make sure Kumi-chan is still breathing.”

Kankurō inhaled sharply, but although she waited a moment, he didn’t speak. Kumi’s belly clenched instinctively, bracing against… something. Her voice, thankfully, remained clear and level.

“Anyway…” she went on, eying him cautiously, “I hated it. And I decided I’d rather not be noticed at all. I kept my head down. I had the right answers if I was called on, but I didn’t explain them, and I never volunteered an answer. I finished strong in competitions and on tests to avoid criticism, but I was careful never to come out on the very top. I wasn’t deliberately rude or hostile to anyone, but I didn’t go out of my way to talk to anybody, either. I learned…”

She bit the tip of her tongue, considering.

“I learned how to make people see what they expected to see,” she said after a moment. “And pretty soon, my grief counselor decided that I had adjusted to my “new normal.” He stopped forcing me to come to appointments. My teachers didn’t ask whether I was eating well or getting enough sleep. My friends stopped inviting me to do things with them, stopped wondering if I was okay. After a while, even the bullies were content to let me be.

“Everyone looked right through me. As long as I appeared to be a reasonably healthy, well-adjusted kid and didn’t make any trouble, no one bothered to look closer.”

“Did you resent that?”

She risked another glance at Kankurō, but he hadn’t moved. Even his eyes hadn’t shifted, still firmly fixed on Kumi’s face, slanted and resolute. Still his voice betrayed nothing. But the atmosphere continued press in around her like a gathering storm, shivering with an indefinable, powerfully repressed feeling, as if the puppet master were a dry fuse, just waiting for a spark.

Kumi tried to conceal a nervous shudder. “Maybe at first,” she conceded carefully. “But by the time Moon Rabbit showed up, I already knew that the most effective sorts of invisibility had nothing to do with genjutsu. And there’s power in being able to hide your thoughts and motivations and abilities, in being unremarkable and insignificant. You have a lot of freedom to maneuver when no one is watching.”

She nodded at the black Widow in his hand. “That’s what I gave my puppets – my hidden intentions. My unrecognized power. You don’t spot Venom quietly sitting on a rock in the middle of a battlefield and recognize her as threat. You just see a little black spider and dismiss her – until it’s too late.”

Kankurō’s long-fingered hand reached up, slow and painfully restrained, to cup the nape of her neck, applying a slight pressure at the base of her skull that forced her to look up and to meet his dark, intent gaze.

Kumi tensed anxiously. He had used just enough force to convince her to tilt her head up, but she did not doubt he would have used more had she resisted. And she couldn’t have stopped him.

“You,” he said roughly, “are not remotely unremarkable or insignificant.”

His fingers trembled on her skull. In a sudden, terrible moment of blinding fear, she realized that he was furious. Whether or not she was the focus of that rage, there was strength enough in the hand on her neck to snap her spine like a dry twig. He wouldn’t even need both hands. The long thumb could simply reach around her throat to find purchase on her jaw, force her head sideways and down, further and further and further until –

She swallowed, captivated by his black eyes like a mouse caught in a cobra’s hypnotic stare.

The fingers loosened their grip abruptly, so that his hand rested open-palmed on the back of her head.

“I’m sorry, Kumi-chan,” he said. His voice was thick with emotions he probably couldn’t have named, let alone concealed. “I should have been there.”

 _Not me_ , she told herself, heart pounding madly. _He isn’t angry with me._

It infuriated her that she’d been frightened. It was Kankurō-dono. He wasn’t going to hurt her. Yet despite her lack of combat experience, she instinctively recognized the aura of violence surrounding him. He wasn’t going to hurt her – but he wanted, badly, to hurt someone.

“I should have fucking been there,” he repeated, hoarse with anger. “You should never have been made to feel that way.”

She shook her head tentatively, unable to look away from his black stare.

“I don’t feel that way now.” It seemed important that he should know that.

His fingertips rested at her hairline, raising gooseflesh down her back. The black eyes tightened just a little, so she ventured a bit more.

“I finished first in my class,” she reminded him. “I realized, during that last year of Academy, that there were still people who cared, and not because they had to. I didn’t have to hide anymore. There was nobody to hide from.”

“Until Friday,” Kankurō interjected, sharply. “Until me,” he clarified. “Goddammit.”

“Well…” she hedged, raising one shoulder.

“I told you point blank that you were an obligation.” He exhaled a slow breath and closed his eyes, grimacing as if in pain. “No wonder you were upset.”

Kumi finally looked away, embarrassed. “I hated being an obligation to strangers,” she admitted quietly. “But being a burden to… to someone I look up to, that would be even worse.”

“You’re not.” He finally relinquished her neck, but he settled his fingertips lightly against her cheek until she glanced up at him again. “You’re not,” he repeated, watching her face intently.

“You’re a precious member of the Kazekage clan. You’re my daughter. And you will never be invisible to me.” His rage settled, simmering, but no longer threatening. “You’re not the only one who knows how to live underneath the underneath, kid. So don’t go thinking you can hide there from me, yeah?”

A forced smile further tamped down on his anger as she nodded. He dropped his hand.

“I hadn’t ever heard it called that before.”

Kumi hugged herself tightly, covered in gooseflesh and trying not to shiver. “Living underneath the underneath. I didn’t call it that until Moon Rabbit left me that note.”

“Probably because it’s been adapted from a Konohan concept.”

The heaviness in the room eased as they each carefully backed into their familiar roles of superior and junior, but a newly-fashioned bridge spanned the expanse between them. If it was fragile and tenuous, still, it might be strengthened and crossed again. Kumi relaxed her hold on her arms, still nervous, but also conscious of a new complication in her already-jumbled feelings regarding Suna’s puppet master. This one, she realized with a surprised twitch of a smile, approached affection.

“Suna nin,” Kankurō went on, ignorant of her musings, “had theatrical roots; some of our old texts refer to it as making a Noh mask of your face. Although the mask never physically changes, it can convey any emotion suitable to the scene, depending on the actor’s skills. It’s the same idea.”

“I’ve never heard it called that, either. Although it was a lot like wearing a mask,” she admitted.

“I’ll dig up some of those essays for you sometime. We’ve got enough on our plates today.”

He gave her a sidelong glance.

“Speaking of,” he segued, handing Venom to her and signaling an end to their awkward conversation, “how would you feel about meeting your aunt and uncle for lunch? And of course, what I’m really asking,” he admitted baldly, “is whether you mind being used as a buffer between three adults who are well and truly pissed at each other?”

Kumi pocketed her Widow. “Happy to be of service,” she replied, smiling despite herself.


End file.
